In the Beginning . . .
I grew up during the 1990’s and remember eras of my life in terms of the computers I owned and the state of the Internet. It feels as if so much time has passed since those early days. After school I would turn on my computer and explore commands and programs on MS-DOS – I would also get my hands on as many diskettes as possible.
My first computer was a Compaq Portable which came with a fold-in keyboard, 9″ green monochrome screen, and two 5 1/4″ floppy disk drives. Everything was built into a single box and it would make a sudden thunk sound when it was switched on.
My life was turned upside-down and right-side-up again when I got a hold of Windows 3.1 and started using a mouse! The Internet was becoming known to the general public but was only available to me through school or library. What a shock when I first saw an email address displayed in a TV commercial!
I would visit my elementary school library just to get on Netscape and search things online. It wasn’t until I got my hands on Windows 95/98 and AOL that the Internet made it’s way home. The term AOL Keyword, and the sound “You’ve Got Mail!” became commonplace for everyone I knew! The Internet excited me with the possibility to communicate with anyone in the world – chat rooms, IMs, and IRC were a big part of my life in those days. Digital pen pals, woohoo!
My first experience with social media was on MySpace. This was the first time I experimented with personalizing my own “website,” since it was a big deal to show off how customized your own space could be through the use of HTML/CSS code in certain areas of your profile editor. This was also around the time the concept of the Internet Celebrity was born.
I remember that YouTube was a finite video repository, people would live their lives in the real world and then post about it online. The Internet was a place for creativity and personal expression. The experience for each user was different because each person decided what they would see.
The Change
That started to change between the years 2009 – 2012. The Internet would change to maximize profits and hold audience’s attention – the goal became a form of addiction for more site hits. Things began to get filtered by algorithms that would show content similar to what you already saw. Sites would introduce the concept of the infinite scroll – a prerequisite to doom scrolling!
I was caught up in all the optimizations and excitement that made the real world and the online world run side-by-side – all the phone apps that made Internet access mobile and instant, and the onset of live streams. We no longer lived life first then posted, we lived life to post – or worst, we lived life on the Internet. Everything became homogeneous and curated based on who you were. The Internet was no longer the digital wild west it once was.
I’ve always had a bend for being nostalgic, but the evolution of the Internet and the self-centered attitude it has fostered in people has caused me to desire to go back to “simpler” days.
What I’m Doing
Here are some of the ways I’m experimenting with turning back the hands of time in my digital world:
- Visiting personal blogs,
- Turning off notifications to apps on my phone (so I have to choose when to check them), and
- Interacting with online content that is created by real users (as opposed to automated accounts)
The maintenance of this blog (even titling it weblog) is my contribution to help feed the old Internet once again.