Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer

» see jenniferfarwell.com/sppntcj as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Jennifer was the most common girl's name in the United States for fifteen straight years, from 1970 through 1984, which meant that by the mid nineties any American mailing list of reasonable size had several of them on it. One such list had five. In 1996 one of the five wrote that somebody really ought to start a society for preventing parents from naming their children Jennifer, and Jennifer Farwell went and built the website.

Farwell ran the page with Jennifer Rich and Jennifer Ang. It was a joke organization with a joke mission and a genuinely real audience: more than two million visitors came through across four years, which for a personal site with no company behind it in the late nineties was an enormous number. The press picked it up fast. The Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a piece in November 1996, and Yahoo! Internet Life listed it that January.

The awards followed, and the awards are the period detail. Cool Central handed it Cool Site of the Hour on 27 October 1996, and Seven Wonders gave it Cool Site of the Day the same afternoon. More arrived through 1997 and 1998 from outfits with names like Fallen Thinkers and Secret Einstein. This was how a website got traffic before search engines worked properly, and every one of those badges was a small animated GIF you were expected to display at the bottom of your page.

I came online in 1998, so this site was live while I was still working out what the web was, and I would not have understood a word of it. The joke runs entirely on American naming statistics. You have to already know that Jennifer was everywhere, that a room in 1994 could plausibly hold four of them, before the premise is funny at all. The same joke in Turkish would be about a completely different name and it would not travel either. What did travel was the award badge, which turned up on Turkish personal pages too, usually collected with rather more pride than the page had earned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it spread ~

The society had no members and no actual position on baby names. It was five people on a mailing list extending a bit further than they meant to. And it worked well enough that WebMD cited it in a feature about naming children, and a journalism class at California State University, Chico used it as a case study in early web culture years after the site itself was gone.

It reached radio as well. Thunder Bay Television News covered it in January 1997 and a CKPR radio program in Ontario put it on air that July, which is a long way for an American mailing list joke to travel with nothing pushing it. The mechanism was the link. Someone found it and put it on their own page, and the chain ran on from there.

~ what remains ~

Nothing, in the sense that no product came out of it and nobody made a living. Everything, in the sense that this is the exact shape almost all early web culture had. A small group with an inside reference, and an audience that arrived through a chain of links from somebody else's page.

Farwell kept an archive of the site on her own domain afterward, which is more than most pages of that vintage ever got, and the Wayback Machine holds the rest. What neither of them holds is the mailing list, because that part was never on the web at all. The joke started somewhere that does not get archived.

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