From BowieWorld to Facebook: How Online Identity Evolved
Exploring different personas on the web is a widespread trend by the late-1990s. Later, Facebook will neuter online identity, but in 1999 you can invent virtual characters on sites like BowieWorld.
In January 1999, BowieNet members were sent a CD that contained software for BowieWorld, a 3D chat environment built by a company called Worlds.com. It was a basic version of what Second Life would eventually launch in 2003 — a virtual world in which cartoonish three dimensional avatars roamed a blocky world and text-chatted with each other.
BowieWorld still exists today, albeit in a zombie state. In 2022, Worlds.com attempted to kick-start it again with an NFT promotion, launched at the 2022 David Bowie World Fan Convention. However, there have been no further updates since then. A Reddit community for Worlds.com shows it still has fans, but recent entries complain of server issues and “total radio silence” from the company.
Even back in its glory days of 1999, BowieWorld was a bizarre 3D experience. In a 2012 video walkthrough, video game designer Paul Hubans described it as “really creepy and cool.” There weren’t many users by this time, so BowieWorld felt to Hubans like an abandoned warren of (mostly underground) rooms. At one point he came across a mute, slowly spinning minotaur in the “Church” room, which he referred to as “the creepy horned statue floating in the air.”
That minotaur was likely an homage to David Bowie himself, whose avatar during the early days of BowieWorld was a minotaur with a hard-on.
The Minotaur in Greek mythology has the head and tail of a bull and the body of a man. It was a recurring theme in Bowie’s music and art during the 1990s — most prominently in his 1995 album Outside, where several tracks are sung from the perspective of 'The Artist/Minotaur'. In a later review of Outside by Graham Williamson from Horrified magazine, the Minotaur character is described as “the nameless artist-psychopath responsible for Baby Grace’s murder.”
But back to BowieWorld. It was a strange, sometimes nonsensical experience — for example, one room was filled with severed hands that flew up in the air when clicked. But like many Bowie internet products, most of the value was in interacting with fellow fans, along with occasional interaction with the man himself.
Bowie’s Virtual Personas
It was clear that Bowie both enjoyed and encouraged the inherent randomness of the web. In BowieWorld, this came through in a couple of different ways. Most obviously in sections like the “Chaos” room, which was like a graphical representation of the Outside album. One review described it as “probably the most unsettling of all the virtual venues in BowieWorld.”
More intriguingly, the internet enabled Bowie to play with personas once more — as he’d famously done throughout the 1970s with characters like Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke. But now, in the 1990s, he could inhabit virtual characters — like the Minotaur — rather than donning a new set of makeup and clothes in the real world.
In a January 1999 interview with The Guardian, Bowie tried to explain his approach to the internet as an artist.
“Interaction on the Web is a little like a mirror, like communicating with a manifestation of yourself. Because it is so chaotic, so decentralised, I find that using the Web becomes like communicating with a hardware version of me. It’s not exactly a doppelgänger, but an alternative version of myself.”
By this point, Bowie was fully into internet culture and loved to talk about it in media interviews — two representative headlines during this time were “Starman Lost in Cyberspace” and “Thin Wired Duke.” The former was an interview with Big Issue published in January, where Bowie’s mischievous side was in play. He talks about his various online pseudonyms, including a panda and one called “Mr Plod.”.
"I get one that I like, then get bored after a week and change it. I even used 'David Bowie' a couple of times, because that's the one name no one would expect me to use. The trouble is I'm always so big-mouthed that people suss me out after about 15 minutes. I say some damn stupid thing and people say: 'Oh we know who you are.'"
In April, he spoke with Ziff Davis’ Yahoo! Internet Life magazine to help promote BowieNet. Again you get the sense that he isn’t being entirely serious — when asked for his thoughts on wearable computers, he replies, “Can you imagine the terrible, nasty things we'll be asked to wear? We'll all look like Devo.” But he also said some revealing things about his approach to the internet, and how it meshes with his artistic modus operandi.
“I've never really put myself out there as a person. I've developed characters. I've been more interested in the process: what an artist is, what a star is. Much of what I do is taking apart and analyzing and re-representing.”
The Evolution of Online Identity
It wasn’t just Bowie who was exploring alternative identities on the web — it was becoming a widespread trend. In a 1999 paper entitled “Cyberspace and Identity,” the American sociologist and author Sherry Turkle explored the phenomenon. Her opening words echo what Bowie told the Guardian: “We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine.”
By this point, Turkle had been exploring how we relate to computers for well over a decade. Reflecting back on an earlier book, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Turkle admitted that in the 1980s she viewed “these identity-transforming relationships” as “most usually one-on-one, a person alone with a machine.” But the Internet in the 1990s, she wrote, now “links millions of people together in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities.”
Online identity would continue to evolve over the first decade of the 2000s, especially with the rise of social networks. Facebook in particular changed our relationship with online identity, because it forced you to use your real name and there were very real privacy risks associated with that.
In a 2013 paper for the UK government, the anthropologist Danny Miller referred to two different studies of online culture he’d done: the first in 1999, when he’d studied “the impact of the internet on a population,” and the second in 2010, when he’d studied “the impact of Facebook on that same population.” He concluded that online identity was two very different things in 1999 compared to 2010:
“The internet initially appeared to expand the field of anonymity, which meant people could explore new forms of identity, shift identity or secure multi identities with relative freedom. This was best enunciated by the 1993 New Yorker cartoon which has one dog saying to another ‘On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog’. By contrast Facebook has been associated with not just the loss of anonymity but as a threat to all aspects of privacy, as even people who don’t take part may be tagged in photos online.”
Miller also pointed out that in 1999, you could join a virtual community based on a specific shared interest (like being a Bowie fan). But in the Facebook era, your interests would merge together into one profile — as Miller put it, Facebook “in effect put what had been separated out identities all within the same muddled online space.“
So the type of online identity you might’ve cultivated in, say, BowieWorld in 1999, was now most likely to be just one of your declared interests on Facebook. There’s a big difference between interacting with fellow fans on the official David Bowie Page on Facebook, and encountering a penguin or a minotaur in Bowie’s 1999 virtual world.
The Role of Imagination
The imagination was a much bigger part of online identity in 1999; and naturally, this excited Bowie. He’d already tested the boundaries of identity as a rock star in the 1970s, and he saw a similar opportunity to play with identity on the Internet. Indeed, he told the Guardian that he might’ve been a web designer rather than a rock star, had he been starting his career in 1999.
“In fact, if I was starting out on my career now, I might even be more interested in the Web than in music. It’s absolutely the new way of communicating. To me, music was never just about being a musician. It was about what you could do with it, how you could bend it and twist it. If I was starting out in music now, I think I’d look on rock as a stodgy, traditional format and the Internet as what’s happening tomorrow.”
Of course, at the time Bowie said that — January 1999 — rock n’ roll was stodgy. It was nearly five years after Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain had killed himself, and by this point, many people felt that grunge had been the last gasp of rock music. The world of popular music in 1999 was increasingly defined by hip hop and the “nu metal” bands that were influenced by hip hop (Limp Bizkit's second album, Significant Other, debuted at number one on the Billboard charts in June).
Even Nine Inch Nails, the innovative band that Bowie had channeled as inspiration for his 1995 album Outside, had morphed into something beyond rock music by 1999. The Fragile, NIN’s third album, was released that year and was heavily influenced by ambient and electronic music. But Bowie had been there, done that with his ‘Berlin trilogy’ of the late 1970s, so there was no point in him returning to that well in 1999.
The album that Bowie eventually released in September 1999, 'hours...', would be directly inspired by the internet — specifically, virtual worlds like BowieWorld and a new interactive game he’d been tapped to help create, called Omikron: The Nomad Soul. We’ll explore Omikron in next week’s post.
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