A Love Letter to the Internet of Old
cameronsworld.net
cameronsworld.net
It's amazing the think that birth and demise of Geocities defined an era. The collection of "Under Construction" banners made me think about how much the balance of creation vs consumption on the Internet changed over the years. As much as sites like Geocities and Myspace were eyesores, they represented creative freedom outside the confines of templates, news feeds and vanilla designs.
No matter what I did or where we lived, 56k dial up in practice was a consistent 3.2 kBps download. 128 kbps MP3s were always about 3.5 MB, which took about 20 minutes to download per track.
I feel like those numbers will be burned in my brain for the rest of my life.
I would absolutely LOVE that count on some websites, just to see the traffic.
still it does remind me how long ago some tv shows and such really were. just seeing an Enterprise E reminded me that that show ended before the Internet as many think of it took off
I was there, it wasn't that great, most of it was about Monty Python or how much people hated Barney the Dinosaur. The modern internet is much more expressive for a great many more people that geocities ever was.
The modern internet is a far more consumer oriented experience than it was in the "old days", so I'm not quite sure what you mean.
Edit: That last "What are you talking about?" part was pretty rude. Sorry about that.
Geocities even constrained by the technology of the day offered far more expressiveness than Facebook’s “fill in these fields and we’ll populate a standard template” approach does.
Geocities, compared to modern platforms, offered more technical freedom in that it gave you direct control over HTML, CSS and Javascript, and yet still many Geocities sites wound up looking very similar to one another, and the quality of content in many cases was more shallow than now.
On the contrary the Facebook of 2020 is far more a monoculture than the internet of 2000 or 1990.
Besides, Facebook is anything but a monoculture - nothing with a billion users could be considered a monoculture, especially not a platform where people maintain their real identity and culture rather than adopting a "platform" culture like on Reddit or 4chan.
Also, obviously, Facebook isn't the internet.
Every time I was amazed how different it was back then. Dense, but cleanly presented information, including links to other high quality websites. Contributions presented as elaborate documents themselves instead of a few lines in a comment box.
Nostalgia is strong, but seeing the difference in front of me regularly, it’s obvious the modern web is missing what this had.
I'm sure there are people on Instagram who are passionate about what they do - their passion just doesn't interest you personally, and that's fine. The internet doesn't have to serve the interests and tastes of just one kind of person.