The Hitchhiker's Guide to Bugger-All

George Orwell is, in my opinion anyway, the greatest essayist in the English language. He is also one of its most depressing novelists. I first read 1984 when I was eighteen and when I had finished the book I vowed never to pick it up again. About ten years later I gave George another chance, and read Coming Up for Air, finding it equally depressing but in a different sort of way. Rather like 1984’s Winston Smith its protagonist, the forty-five year old George ‘Tubby’ Bowling, goes up against insurmountable historical forces. In Bowling's case it isn’t the increasingly finely engineered malice of the totalitarian state towards the individual, rather a casual indifference emerging from what once would have been called ‘progress’. But, like Smith, he ends up being utterly crushed by it.

Bowling has a small windfall after a flutter on the gee-gees and decides to spend a weekend away from his termagant of a wife and his family, revisiting some old childhood haunts in his home village of 'Lower Binfield'. When he gets there, he finds the place unrecognisable. Everything has changed: the local where he stays; his family home, now a tea shop; his old girlfriend, to whom age has not been kind. The final disappointment takes the form of a secluded pond full of carp where he fished as a child, and is now a rubbish dump. Nostalgia, in George’s case, certainly wasn’t what it used to be.

Another overweight 45-year-old decided to go on a nostalgia trip of his own over the Easter weekend and ended up having much the same experience as George. Except, this time, he didn’t even have to leave his house, which was a good thing as a nasty operation had left him pretty much housebound. Instead he decided to visit one of his online haunts, the BBC’s h2g2 ‘community’. H2g2, in case you don’t know, was set up in 1999 by the late great Douglas Adams during the dot-com boom as a realization of the central idea behind his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. Adams, very much a visionary, felt that the technology underlying the Internet was mature enough to make the concept of a real-time electronic guidebook to real life, written by ordinary people, a practicable proposition.

Initially, when the Internet business domain was awash with money, such a guide might have made a fair amount of money if it could attract readers (and therefore advertisers). As we all know, this wasn’t to be the case. The Internet bubble, predicated on there being an unlimited pool of advertising revenue, burst rather predictably. H2g2 along with countless other new online ventures went bust, and Adams was forced to find another partner. In this case, the BBC was interested in using the underlying technology as a ‘community engine’. They bought out h2g2 lock, stock and barrel. The h2g2 community, mainly amateur authors like me, dutifully trooped over to the new h2g2. We accepted that new masters were in charge that had different priorities and standards but carried on contributing all the same.

Up to this point it was fair to say that h2g2 was thriving. Authors mainly wrote about places and experiences they wanted to share with others. In contrast some, like me, tried to inject a little bit of zest into topics that might otherwise have been regarded as dryly factual, such as artists’ pigment and road cats eyes. We wrote because we enjoyed writing, we wanted others to enjoy reading, and because we ultimately wanted to enjoy being read. This enthusiasm was tangible: in the early years, every day brought at least ten new h2g2 ‘Edited Guide entries’ that jostled for prominence. The ultimate accolade was to be accorded Editor’s 'Pick of the Day': you got your entry decorated with a very nice piece of in-house generated artwork, known as a ‘blob’. Even though I say so myself, I was a damned good writer and managed to collect quite a few of these blobs, adorning my 'Personal Space' on h2g2 like so many trophy heads on a country squire's wall.

As is well known, Adams died tragically at the young age of 49 after suffering a heart attack, not long after the BBC took over. The BBC, loyal as ever to its protégés, sustained and underwrote Adams’ vision of an ever growing guide to Life, the Universe and Everything. So, ten years on, how has h2g2 fared?

The answer is ‘not well’. I visited the site for the first time in a year on Sunday. There were three entries that day. Two of them, true to the BBC’s traditional holiday scheduling, were ‘repeats’, first published in 2004 and 2005. The sole remaining entry was a deconstruction of the meaning of the parking sign ‘Gates in Constant Use’, being a rather clumsy attempt to capture the digressive style of one of Adams wry musings on the iniquities of life. It wasn’t particularly funny or well-written, and didn’t tell you anything you wanted to know in the first place. Is this really the best kind of factual writing that anyone can think of?

One might also ask why our license is fee supporting this kind of deeply self-indulgent writing. To be honest, I’ve found the BBC’s commitment to this project questionable at the best of times. Given h2g2's current state of health, a tenure as one of the few paid members of the Editorial team, the ‘Italics’, might be seen more as a stepping stone to a lucrative career in web publishing than anything else. So, one cannot avoid forming the impression that these people are less concerned about actually publishing something of use than having a quiet life. . As for the volunteers, who make up the vast bulk of the community, very few of them actually merit the title of ‘Field Researcher for the Guide’, in that they seldom if ever get off their arses, visit places, restaurants, cinemas, galleries and the suchlike, and then write about them. Being brutally honest about my own contributions, I can’t claim that they embodied this spirit either. There are one or two notable exceptions, such as this estimable lady who has contributed far more than I ever will and actually seems to be writing about her own experiences.

But, on the whole, people who still contribute do so out of some sense of duty or because they want to be regarded as being a big fish in a very small pond. George Bowling would recognise this pond now as it is increasingly filling up with the sort of material that would have been discarded by other more discerning sites. I think the rot started to set in when some authors thought that quantity of output mattered more than quality. To be able to claim that having 100 or more Edited Guide entries to your name was seen as a major achievement by some. No matter that these articles were increasingly lazy, tedious and formulaic in nature. This kind of thinking reached its nadir with a series of line-by-line deconstructions of novelty songs that had long been forgotten, mainly because they were simply lists of people, places or events. The actual subject matter was dredged up to serve the format, which had become an object of primary importance: Tail, meet Dog. It was nothing more than 'Writing By Numbers' and, worse, belied a total lack of a sense of a broader audience by a community far too pleased with itself. So, as h2g2 approaches its tenth birthday, I have some well-meant words of advice for it.

Firstly: don’t try to compete with sites like Wikipedia. H2g2 shouldn’t be a repository for the total sum of human knowledge. Neither should Wikipedia for that matter but both sites do different things and should play to their strengths.

Secondly: Evolve or die. H2g2 needs to rediscover its distinctive voice. Stop trying to be all things to all people. There is a niche for a comprehensive online publication that encourages opinionated, spiky writing about real world experience. Ordinary people like to know what others actually think about places, people, films, art galleries, visitor attractions and the suchlike. H2g2 ought to make an attempt to reach out to readers who would not otherwise have given it a second glance. It can achieve this goal simply by developing a sense of audience beyond its current catchment.

Thirdly, and finally: keep Douglas Adams' vision alive, but let the man himself rest in peace. He was a very funny man and one of a kind, but he would have seen h2g2 as a starting point for encouraging people to go out and enjoy life, not as an end in itself. His spectre nevertheless seems to haunt h2g2's current writing, and a very pale thing it is indeed. The very last thing he could have wished was for its authorship to end up aping his own.