Interviewer- Part of its context. If you talk a certain way in a room full of people that you did not expect to talk a certain way, you would stand out. If you were cussin' and screamin' in a bar, where everyone else is cussin' and screamin', that's okay, but its very different than if you are in a church. In the world of Web memoir, or personal stories, you have created a context where you can get away with things that you could not get away with in a Website where the creator has proclaimed a level of propriety or responsibility for the words that are said.

Justin- Some growth took place in me when I had to develop my own sense of decorum and decency, and what would take place if you have the kind of anarchy of context that you have on the Web, you don't have editors or people focussing on propriety, what arises spontaneously in terms of values and priorities. I think the personal storytelling community on the Web is focussed in self-reflection and protecting the identity of their familiars. I think most people that keep diaries start them before they are 35 or something and they are really media savvy and they are aware of people like John Hinckley and Truman Capote who lost all his friends by writing about them. You reflect on those examples and what you want to see come out of that. Because you really do get to create a world and if a world is devoid of friends it can be a really depressing place to be.

The Web is inspiring for its collaboration. Although it is easy to still and I am sure there is entire field of people who are involved in a kind of one upmansship and theft and exciting pleasures of the darkside. It’s not the community that I have been a part of and I am happy to see a number of people who are more interested in a kind of meandering about and telling less edgy stuff. I put out a feeler a couple of months ago "What do you think have been the best stories that I have put on my page?" And I got one response from someone who said, "I love it Justin when you go out and take some drugs and you meet these weird guys and your life if slightly in danger and you write about it." It’s like some William Burroughs-thing or something. Then somebody else said, "I really like it when you sit and think about your emotional state and your ex-girlfriends and who you are as a person." And I have two different sides of the coin, one person said "leave your house and put your life in danger," and the other said gaze at your navel. And both of them were responding to my fictions. And its really hard to sustain the stuff that is so exciting and titillating culture, but it is heartwarming to think there are people out there who actually care about introspective yammering.

Interviewer- Undoubtedly, it allows people them visit something about themselves. On storytelling though, I am trying to make the formal distinction that a storyteller is someone that is in the room with their audience and they are aware of the interaction with their audience. When you think about that in a live performance context, it’s kind of clear. However in the context of a media artifact it’s a little less clear. What does it mean to be in the room with someone who is reading your work in any time and any place, and any context and any state of mind that you have no control of? I think in comes down to trying to motivate the audience to hear your voice in a certain way that invites them to respond. And I think there is a kind of writing that asks for that, a writing that invites response, versus one that is simply declarative.

Justin- I think that is a really interesting distinction for me because when I went to work for Wired I thought I had come there to build Hotwired as a Website to invite dialogue with people. And then it became clear very quickly it was not supposed to be written or designed in that way that invited responses as much as it was meant to be the end all authority on things. I think what you have hit on with that distinction is that storytelling is a permeable thing where the person that is speaking has faults and you can see them and they may not even try to hide them but the holes in the story, or the faults in the person, or the humanity of the experiences it says "oh yeah, that happened to me too, and let me tell you why and how."

I was held up at gunpoint and it was really traumatic for me, and I wrote about it on my Webpage and I got about ten different stories within two days, from people, from teachers at my college, from people I have never heard from who had been reading my Webpage for years, and relatives, and certain random folks that sent me tales about when they had been held up. And that was part of the impetus for me to start bud.com, a Website where anything posted there would naturally be an invitation, because when I was doing my links.net when it’s the Justin Hall show, there is not really a format for me to publish other people’s stories. That’s why for the last two year’s while I have been doing my own Website I have been kind of following up with, as a community obligation, teaching as many people as I could so that its not up to me to publish them but to give them the tool to publish themselves. And that is really exciting, and I have seen a lot of people do things that they might not have done things otherwise, or things that I had not seen before. Now I have reached a point where I find there is another layer of people that already do write or don’t see them writing that informally because storytelling is so informal, that I am really hoping that bud.com becomes a place where I can really solicit more informal form of writing where people have a position, and that it is clear who the author is and all those things that you lose in tight, filtered media. I can have a place where I can solicit that from people, and take responsibility for publishing that because a lot of people just don’t have access to the tools, or don’t think of the Web as a place for email correspondence that is funny or insightful.