Her/stories...
I used to hang out on alt.shoe.lesbians.moderated a usenet group, years ago, back in 1997/8. I was working at NTL and browsing the net in quiet periods. I became facinated by the whole USENET thing. It interested me far more than the increasingly commerical www, it was strange and off the beaten track. This was back in the days that there was a favorable signal to noise ratio on USENET, just about that time alt.shoe.lesbians had just succomb to a sea of sex related spam.

This of course belied the folkloric origins of the place, it was never originaly a lesbian hangout, but the alleged construction of a couple of Canadian computer students that made up implausable sounding 'groups' and sat back and watched what might appear. Possibly unsurprisingly enough, lesbians started to appear. A convention developed that shoes were to be mentioned within the post, customarily at the end of a posting. Just tales of everyday life, with footware mentioned. But because of the L word in the groups title, the group threatened to become submerged by spam. There was an exodus to a new group, alt.shoe.lesbians.moderated, the same but edited.

In the original version of this site there were pages of three other women. Apart from myself, Tilly there was Fling, who was painting a portrait of Mari Equi in Portland, OR, USA, Hels who painted South African Land/town _scapes and Shiney, who was working on her second novel in Melbourne. They were all immensely creative women that I had met in an online in a group and had struck up a correspondence with. This was an attempt at documenting our experience of the web.
 

Fling, explained best:
 
Here's how it works.  You've got a computer.  You can sit down at that computer and type in anything you like.  You can transcribe a recipe, you can write the great American novel, or you can write about your last bowel movement.  It could be utter garbage, or bloody brilliant.  It doesn't matter. 

Next you stick a modem onto your computer, plug in a phone line, and your words are sent to a place where lots of people can see them.  And they respond.  People from all over the world, or maybe from just from a few hundreds yards away are being touched, even if only for a moment, by words that you wrote. 

By now you're either thinking, "Cool!" or: "What a bunch of losers."  But no matter which camp you happen to be in, the fact remains that there are now, right this very minute, millions of people who are online and thinking that it's not such a bad place to hang out.  The question is not so much what do they find when they get there, but rather what is it that they take with them when they go? 

The answer to that question is:  Everything.  As much as they might dearly love to, they can't leave themselves behind when they enter the wired world.  Much has been written about internet predators, but the truth is that even when someone attempts to purposefully disguise who they are, something true is revealed.  People are incredibly tenacious when it comes to their personalities.  Even when they fake it they reveal something about who they are.  Oscar Wilde wrote, "A mask tells us more than a face."  This is the great truth about cyberspace.  That it reveals even as it conceals. 

So you can't hide who you really are in cyber space.  Okay.  Most people don't really want to anyway.  They are who they are, both online and off. For some it is the very act of revealing who they are that they find so compelling.  They go online because they find community there; a place to hang out.  Like they used to hang out with their buddies when they were growing up. 

Think back to the time when you were young.  When your friendships evolved over years and years shared history.  Time spent just hanging out.   Time spent talking to one another about everything, every least little thing, the same subjects mostly, over and over.  It was the process of discovery that was shared.  A running conversation wherein new information or ideas were added practically every day.  After a while you could tell what was up with any of your friends by a single gesture. 

Virtual communites are just like that.  They exist in time.  They give you a place to hang out, a place to come to over and over again.  A place to tell your stories.  History likes to tell the big stories, but people are more interestested in telling the smaller ones.  We'd rather talk about 
ourselves.  Our own cuts and scrapes, our new jobs and our lost jobs and our nose jobs.  What we think about, gossip about, dream about and the things that happen to us every day on the way to those dreams.  The stories of our lives are what you need to know in order to know a person.  You have to hang out with someone, day after day, in order to hear these stories. They unfold over time. 

This is the story of four creative minds, who met online, and began sharing their stories with each other.  They told them again and again, each time getting them a little more right.  Each time understanding themselves and each other a little better, and revealing, bit by bit, pieces of who they were.
and so we tried to begin...