the internet has somehow grown in scale massively yet has narrowed in scope. Does anyone else feel that way? Maybe that was just the youthful curiosity I had 20 years ago, maybe also symptomatic of growing up in a small town with a stagnant culture. It felt like stepping onto another planet where no matter where I'd look, there's something I'd never heard of or seen before.
It also used to give off the sensation of expertise. I could go to a forum for anything and someone there would have encyclopedic knowledge about emulating games or books I'd never heard of, anything I wanted to find was there. That part is still the same, but it's been stripped of that personal, intimate characteristic I used to feel from it.
There was a lot more tinkering too. Websites used to be a lot more experimental, but my childhood memories might be glossing over the jankiness of it all. Everything was a lot more individual. Nowadays a social media profile will look identical to everyone else's: sterile, laid out identically, pictures and everything in the same format. Back then you had no clue what you were in for. Someone's website would play music when you open it, they'd play around with the html to flash colors, there'd be gifs floating around all over the place. If you liked part of someone's website, you could copy the html from the source and put it on your own site.
I think that's why there was so much ambient oddness. The only people who were bothering to learn how to navigate this incredibly unreliable, impenetrable thing would have been odd themselves. The only other things to do on the internet were read the news or send emails, so the average user had nothing to gain. Odd, obsessive folk had everything to gain. There's a forum about my obsession? And I can pretend to be the main character? And I can set up a geocities shrine that plays their theme song? Sign me up.
the internet has somehow grown in scale massively yet has narrowed in scope. Does anyone else feel that way? Maybe that was just the youthful curiosity I had 20 years ago, maybe also symptomatic of growing up in a small town with a stagnant culture. It felt like stepping onto another planet where no matter where I'd look, there's something I'd never heard of or seen before.
It also used to give off the sensation of expertise. I could go to a forum for anything and someone there would have encyclopedic knowledge about emulating games or books I'd never heard of, anything I wanted to find was there. That part is still the same, but it's been stripped of that personal, intimate characteristic I used to feel from it.
There was a lot more tinkering too. Websites used to be a lot more experimental, but my childhood memories might be glossing over the jankiness of it all. Everything was a lot more individual. Nowadays a social media profile will look identical to everyone else's: sterile, laid out identically, pictures and everything in the same format. Back then you had no clue what you were in for. Someone's website would play music when you open it, they'd play around with the html to flash colors, there'd be gifs floating around all over the place. If you liked part of someone's website, you could copy the html from the source and put it on your own site.
I think that's why there was so much ambient oddness. The only people who were bothering to learn how to navigate this incredibly unreliable, impenetrable thing would have been odd themselves. The only other things to do on the internet were read the news or send emails, so the average user had nothing to gain. Odd, obsessive folk had everything to gain. There's a forum about my obsession? And I can pretend to be the main character? And I can set up a geocities shrine that plays their theme song? Sign me up.