This is consistent with Bowie's genius to be more an early adopter type than a visionary type. A hell of an early adopter.
Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as being 'caring for their customers'. That was it. The extent of users' say in anything.
Early Internet still reflected that world order. It was a one way street in which the people consumed what the corporations produced. There weren't even comment forms under any article in any prominent publication. After all, who are you, a lowly pleb, to comment under an article in which a glorious, 6-figure columnist from the 'right background' wrote. Know your place.
User-generated content lived in the fringes of the Internet in those days. It was the plebs' place. The unwashed.
Then comes blogging. Social media. User-generated content starts to dominate and becomes de-facto content. Everything turns upside down. We are living in its aftermath, in which its even hard to imagine how one-way the early Internet was.
Early internet had little to none of that world order. Those corporations are slow to act and tend to be last to the party.
I think you're conflating people from that world order and how they interpreted the internet, with how the internet actually was.
> User-generated content lived in the fringes of the Internet in those days. It was the plebs' place. The unwashed.
User generated content was a large majority of the content of the early internet. Usenet. MUDs. Email. Forums. Random people's university websites.
I think my take away is more that these large “visions” of what the internet could be were made by outsiders from an outside vantage point. They had difference answers to the question of what the internet could be. The insiders were too busy playing around on it to think about answering that question.
Those corporations dominated the Internet. It was NYT et al who was doing the publishing and the users doing the reading. Large, incumbent corporations dominated online sales.
That they were slow to react to the changes and therefore the user-driven Internet eventually took over from them for that reason do not change the fact that the early Internet was literally a one-way street.
Unlike today, right?
It's not like tiktok/Insta or the news/blog promotional articles are anything but ads... people just don't "know their place" any more.
I would say that describes the online world now, not at the internets adoption in 1990s.
I think this is a fair statement for the world wide web (although there were pretty notable standouts, particularly in the very late 90s), but every other protocol was far more democratized with very little corporate influence, and those protocols were far more relevant in 1994 than they are now.
Very few large corporations had even heard of this crazy new "Internet" thing in the 90s, and even fewer cared. Almost none had a corporate webpage even listing their address and phone number, much less produced any content at all.
Many had the .com domain name corresponding to their corporate brand registered by domain squatters they later had to buy it from. Some didn't even notice for years.
I guess its because I combined content creation + publication under the title 'content that people are misunderstanding.
Large companies created the content, they published it, they dominated the views. The user generated content being seen by a few hundred people a month in a forum or a personal homepage on the fringes of the Internet did not make any dent in their monopoly at the time.
Mix in the fact that there was a trend of children making headlines for breaking into various high-tech or secretive areas, and it seemed more like something that didn't have much cause to be respected.