Today, as I was commenting on something heavily politicized, I was grounded. The comment I had submitted was marked: "pending moderator approval due to our policy" which further meant, there's no way you're going to say what you are freely thinking nor are others going to be able to see it. Suddenly I had a flashback to the 90s when the internet was like a small home town. It was large but still had that small home town feeling. Everyone had a story to share, cool or fun pictures to add to their Geocities sites and everyone was just really in love with the technology and in love with sharing any and all information. It is after all, one of the most amazing communication breakthroughs to ever happen in our lifetime.
It took me a moment to realize what the internet has become and why I miss the early days before the mega networks took over and killed off the little guys. It was in this very moment of censorship that made me fully appreciate what we once had. Past-tense. We're now a society at the larger hand of a network, corporation or someone else that has to a "agree" with your view before it is allowed for anyone else to see it. Sure, it has always "kind of" been that way but never to this extent and more often than not, it would require more legwork to get something taken down.
I tend to do a lot of research in my spare time in regards to a lot of vintage computer stuff and generally hit the archive site. It's with great sadness that I see most of the real sites had died once MySpace really took off. Blogs were of course still a thing but not nearly quite the same as they were before with personal websites. I would stumble upon personal stories or ramblings by someone who was passionate about sharing the details of their life for many years and months and up until a certain point, no more updates. Generally right around the 2000 to 2002 mark. Some sites lasted a little longer, some died even sooner than that but it it's something that really brought me a deeper sadness of realization.
Everyone wants or wanted to be heard. They'd pour endless amounts of time and effort into a singe page or multiple webpages, learning HTML or other things and buying expensive computer gear just to do it all for fun and just to post a few pictures, some stories and a digital cat photo to their personal website. The nice thing about that is, we have things like archive to go back to have this rare glimpse into the early years of the internet, before MySpace, Facebook, Livejournal and many others that came along, trying to centralize everything but always failing for one reason or another. The flipside to that is, now everything requires a membership or login, is not public and as as result, there's now quite literally this 20-year gap of amazing amounts of information unable to be archived and things no one will ever see, just due to the shift of how our social networks operate now.
I miss Geocities.... and I miss Lycos. Alta Vista was a nice thing too to search people up, or so I remember. Kind of thought with the internet, we were past the dying breeds of a BBS, where people would share or post to and overnight the owner of said BBS could turn the lights off for all information never to be seen again. I'm finding myself feeling that unease again and realizing that the internet morphed into what I was afraid of happening with information if a BBS died back then, never to be found or seen again.
Guess I'm feeling quite nostalgic lately. I've got my Atari STe out and setup to play games, I've been taking pictures with a Sony Cybershot DSC-F717 and even have a B&W photo printer setup because all of this odd and goofy stuff, I still find enjoyable despite not being absolutely cutting edge. Maybe it's time to load up some X-Files, though I will admit Project Blue Book has been a nice void filler since we recently finished off the entire series of Alf. Not even really that much into aliens but it does seem that way with all the series we've been watching lately. Alf made me realize just how much we've changed as a society too. Can't tell you how many times I caught myself saying: "there's no way that would fly today if Alf said or did that!" and it's true.
I have included a picture of my non-existent cat created by AI to make this post relevant.
It took me a moment to realize what the internet has become and why I miss the early days before the mega networks took over and killed off the little guys. It was in this very moment of censorship that made me fully appreciate what we once had. Past-tense. We're now a society at the larger hand of a network, corporation or someone else that has to a "agree" with your view before it is allowed for anyone else to see it. Sure, it has always "kind of" been that way but never to this extent and more often than not, it would require more legwork to get something taken down.
I tend to do a lot of research in my spare time in regards to a lot of vintage computer stuff and generally hit the archive site. It's with great sadness that I see most of the real sites had died once MySpace really took off. Blogs were of course still a thing but not nearly quite the same as they were before with personal websites. I would stumble upon personal stories or ramblings by someone who was passionate about sharing the details of their life for many years and months and up until a certain point, no more updates. Generally right around the 2000 to 2002 mark. Some sites lasted a little longer, some died even sooner than that but it it's something that really brought me a deeper sadness of realization.
Everyone wants or wanted to be heard. They'd pour endless amounts of time and effort into a singe page or multiple webpages, learning HTML or other things and buying expensive computer gear just to do it all for fun and just to post a few pictures, some stories and a digital cat photo to their personal website. The nice thing about that is, we have things like archive to go back to have this rare glimpse into the early years of the internet, before MySpace, Facebook, Livejournal and many others that came along, trying to centralize everything but always failing for one reason or another. The flipside to that is, now everything requires a membership or login, is not public and as as result, there's now quite literally this 20-year gap of amazing amounts of information unable to be archived and things no one will ever see, just due to the shift of how our social networks operate now.
I miss Geocities.... and I miss Lycos. Alta Vista was a nice thing too to search people up, or so I remember. Kind of thought with the internet, we were past the dying breeds of a BBS, where people would share or post to and overnight the owner of said BBS could turn the lights off for all information never to be seen again. I'm finding myself feeling that unease again and realizing that the internet morphed into what I was afraid of happening with information if a BBS died back then, never to be found or seen again.
Guess I'm feeling quite nostalgic lately. I've got my Atari STe out and setup to play games, I've been taking pictures with a Sony Cybershot DSC-F717 and even have a B&W photo printer setup because all of this odd and goofy stuff, I still find enjoyable despite not being absolutely cutting edge. Maybe it's time to load up some X-Files, though I will admit Project Blue Book has been a nice void filler since we recently finished off the entire series of Alf. Not even really that much into aliens but it does seem that way with all the series we've been watching lately. Alf made me realize just how much we've changed as a society too. Can't tell you how many times I caught myself saying: "there's no way that would fly today if Alf said or did that!" and it's true.
I have included a picture of my non-existent cat created by AI to make this post relevant.
Nowadays, it's not as fun. 
And to make things worse, the search engines like Google and even Duck Go Go become so dumb that it gets harder to find precisely what people are looking for.
Lots of other great links in there too, including 