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Internet Golden Age: 1998-2010 (Part 1)
Nov. 16th, 2018 10:31 amThis dating is of course purely my own opinion and thus reflective of my own experiences as an avid internet user. And there's certainly some generational bias at play here, as I was born at the ass-end of GenX, just as it was cusping into the Millennial birth era. Being born before 1996, I'm naturally going to have some affections for the "wild wild west" era of the internet, i.e. that time when web technology was still aesthetically-minimalist, code-simplistic and low-bandwidth, yet accessible to a general consumer population. All these factors come together to comprise a sort of "sweet spot" that existed roughly between 1998-2010.
1998 is about the time when dial-up internet use had reached a critical mass here in the US and a small handful of closed-interface subscription services (as opposed to a sandbox internet connection) accounted for a large bulk of internet usership among the general population. The 90s in general was the era of the first user-friendly personal computers with the capability of internet connectivity. By the late 90s' a lot of ordinary people had at least one PC in the house and an account to a dial-up service like AOL. By this time, core internet functions like email and chat rooms and forums had entered the mass vernacular. Also in the late 90s these dial-up monoliths (well, mostly AOL) had started offering access to the still-young World Wide Web. In other words, users were given the ability to venture off the plantation of the in-house chats, forums and user directory and could now connect to the truly open internet. Users could also access newsgroups -- a core feature of the very old internet of the 80s. Newsgroups were the prototype of the web forum, just as email was of instant messaging and chat. Of course email is very much still with us today, though it's been relegated to the area of formal communication and a storage area for web site login info/verification and subscriptions.
AOL gave its users access to the WWW and many of those users soon realized they didn't need AOL any more. The user could simply switch to a (much cheaper) barebones dial-up service, one where, once you were connected, you were on your own to use the internet through the use of various desktop applications like Outlook for email, Internet Explorer or Netscape for web browsing, an FTP client, an IRC chat client like MIRC, an instant messenger client like AOL-IM or ICQ, ect. And hence the Internet Golden Age was upon us. Users could interface with the world in total anonymity if they so chose and of course express themselves in any way they wanted.
By the early 2000s there were still plenty of users on the dial-up monoliths; mostly those older and less tech-saavy users who would have had considerable difficulty navigating the decentralized internet; those users who still needed all their core activity concentrated under one safe and predictable interface. But this is also the time when the open web became ubiquitous on every university campus throughout the west. Any computer in a computer lab had access to the entire internet and thus the entirety of college-attending youth became accustomed to this decentralized internet.
The early 2000s was also the time when the first generation of mass-user social media sites came to be. I'm thinking particularly of Friendster which launched in 2003 and generated an immediate hype craze. Not long after it launched, nearly everyone in my acquaintance circle was using it. ( Read more... )
1998 is about the time when dial-up internet use had reached a critical mass here in the US and a small handful of closed-interface subscription services (as opposed to a sandbox internet connection) accounted for a large bulk of internet usership among the general population. The 90s in general was the era of the first user-friendly personal computers with the capability of internet connectivity. By the late 90s' a lot of ordinary people had at least one PC in the house and an account to a dial-up service like AOL. By this time, core internet functions like email and chat rooms and forums had entered the mass vernacular. Also in the late 90s these dial-up monoliths (well, mostly AOL) had started offering access to the still-young World Wide Web. In other words, users were given the ability to venture off the plantation of the in-house chats, forums and user directory and could now connect to the truly open internet. Users could also access newsgroups -- a core feature of the very old internet of the 80s. Newsgroups were the prototype of the web forum, just as email was of instant messaging and chat. Of course email is very much still with us today, though it's been relegated to the area of formal communication and a storage area for web site login info/verification and subscriptions.
AOL gave its users access to the WWW and many of those users soon realized they didn't need AOL any more. The user could simply switch to a (much cheaper) barebones dial-up service, one where, once you were connected, you were on your own to use the internet through the use of various desktop applications like Outlook for email, Internet Explorer or Netscape for web browsing, an FTP client, an IRC chat client like MIRC, an instant messenger client like AOL-IM or ICQ, ect. And hence the Internet Golden Age was upon us. Users could interface with the world in total anonymity if they so chose and of course express themselves in any way they wanted.
By the early 2000s there were still plenty of users on the dial-up monoliths; mostly those older and less tech-saavy users who would have had considerable difficulty navigating the decentralized internet; those users who still needed all their core activity concentrated under one safe and predictable interface. But this is also the time when the open web became ubiquitous on every university campus throughout the west. Any computer in a computer lab had access to the entire internet and thus the entirety of college-attending youth became accustomed to this decentralized internet.
The early 2000s was also the time when the first generation of mass-user social media sites came to be. I'm thinking particularly of Friendster which launched in 2003 and generated an immediate hype craze. Not long after it launched, nearly everyone in my acquaintance circle was using it. ( Read more... )
