Seminal Online Community, The Well, Lives On

In 2001 when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers I edited and published an excellent book by journalist Katie Hafner, The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community, a narrative and oral history, which included verbatim posts and original group discussions on the early online platform and other exchanges written by founding members of the first online community. It is  an exciting reading experience because it combines all those different kinds of material, making it a very modern sort of epistolary work, one of my favorite narrative forms. That holds true for me, whether in fiction, where it’s seen in exceptional novels such as Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary, or in nonfiction, which often means diary books, like the epic A Diary of the Century, which I edited and published with Edward Robb Ellis (Kodansha America, 1995), the most prolific diarist in the history of American letters.

Subject-wise, reading Katie’s book is like observing the birth of the Internet, an ur-moment, one which even involves the beginnings of social media, before the latter was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. The manuscript grew out of a cover story on The Well that Katie had done for the Wired magazine issue of May 1997. I’d bought the print magazine off a newsstand when I saw the intriguing tag line—what was this “seminal online community”? I still have my copy of the magazine. I hung on to it, and three years later, when I was leaving Kodansha America and starting a new job with Times Books at Random House, I looked Katie up, invited her to tea, and asked if she’d like to do The Well story as a book. I recall that Katie expanded the 40,000 word article a bit, I then edited that updated manuscript and we published the book a year later. It was one of the books I really relished being involved with.

I’ve read tonight in a NY Times story that Salon.com, which had acquired The Well in the late 90s, has now sold The Well to an investment group made up some of its current members.

Among The Well’s founding members were such countercultural stalwarts as Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, Larry Brilliant, Gail Williams, and a host of comparatively unsung but pivotal Internet pioneers. These people are all characters in Katie Hafner’s sleek and moving book.  I admire The Well’s legacy and hope its new owner-members will make something special of it once again.

2013 update: Katie Hafner has a newer book, as well, a family memoir titled Mother Daughter Me. I really liked it and wrote about it on this blog.