Internet Golden Age: 1998-2010 (Part 1)
Nov. 16th, 2018 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
causticusThis 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. And then just a year later Myspace happened and not long after that, everyone I knew on Friendster jumped over the Myspace and that became THE big thing for the next five years or so. Of course Friendster wasn't the first social network. It followed in the footsteps of earlier endeavors like Makeoutclub, (among a few others) which catered to a specific subcultural niche. Livejournal was also a sort of proto social network, but again it had more of a niche user base. Friendster OTOH was quite user friendly out of the box and geared for more of a mass appeal audience. Several years after Myspace became a raging success, it became a cluttered mess due to users being able take extreme liberties in customizing their profile pages; lets just say some pages ended up being either vomit or seizure-inducing.
Facebook came along during Myspace's heyday and was originally purposed as social network for college/university students. Around the time when Myspace jumped the shark, Facebook opened itself to a general user base and provided these users a massively more clean and professional-looking profile page and social media features than Myspace had been doing. I remember first joining in late 2007. Eventually, much of Myspace's user base jumped over to Facebook and Myspace ended up becoming a site primarily for bands and music artists to promote themselves. And of course, Facebook became THE big thing for casual social networking, i.e. keeping touch with friends, family and acquaintances.
2007 also saw the rise of Twitter, which became THE place for journalists, tech personalities, celebrities, public figures and anyone aspiring to be any of the above to communicate publically in the form of 140 character "tweets," what founder Jack Dorsey termed "short bursts of inconsequential information." He was damn spot-on about the inconsequential part. Twitter quickly developed into the ultimate narcissism-enabling machine for self-important people, famous or not. I remember back around 2007-08 avoiding Twitter like the plague; the idea of sharing my inconsequential bursts of mental runoff to complete strangers seemed quite bizarre to me. I much preferred the comfy-cozy personal atmosphere of facebook where I could share those silly little brain farts with people I actually knew IRL. The whole point of Twitter anyway was to be a place where you could follow the mental runoff of people with some degree of name recognition; there you are either a member of the Celeb and Techie Nomenklatura or you are a Follower. In other words, you either follow a lot of people, or have lots of followers. Dorsey and co. soon introduced the now-infamous "blue checkmark" which is a verification tick to signify that a user has verified their real identity with the site's staff. In function though, the blue check means you are a public figure whom the Twitterati approves of, probably because you have the "right" opinions (see: Silicon Valley shitlib culture). Today, in the thick of the culture wars raging, the Silicon Valley PC puritan hall monitor will yank away that blue check in heartbeat if you are deemed as someone who has the "wrong" opinions. Anyway I could ramble on about Twitter for awhile, but I won't here. I've never had a Twitter account with more than 100 followers anyway, thus by mental or emotional investment in the platform is pretty much nil.
I'll be getting more into Facebook in subsequent updates, after I pen my thoughts regarding the Mobile era that has supplanted the the Internet Golden Age. And then I'll talk about my overall impressions of how this all fits together.
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. And then just a year later Myspace happened and not long after that, everyone I knew on Friendster jumped over the Myspace and that became THE big thing for the next five years or so. Of course Friendster wasn't the first social network. It followed in the footsteps of earlier endeavors like Makeoutclub, (among a few others) which catered to a specific subcultural niche. Livejournal was also a sort of proto social network, but again it had more of a niche user base. Friendster OTOH was quite user friendly out of the box and geared for more of a mass appeal audience. Several years after Myspace became a raging success, it became a cluttered mess due to users being able take extreme liberties in customizing their profile pages; lets just say some pages ended up being either vomit or seizure-inducing.
Facebook came along during Myspace's heyday and was originally purposed as social network for college/university students. Around the time when Myspace jumped the shark, Facebook opened itself to a general user base and provided these users a massively more clean and professional-looking profile page and social media features than Myspace had been doing. I remember first joining in late 2007. Eventually, much of Myspace's user base jumped over to Facebook and Myspace ended up becoming a site primarily for bands and music artists to promote themselves. And of course, Facebook became THE big thing for casual social networking, i.e. keeping touch with friends, family and acquaintances.
2007 also saw the rise of Twitter, which became THE place for journalists, tech personalities, celebrities, public figures and anyone aspiring to be any of the above to communicate publically in the form of 140 character "tweets," what founder Jack Dorsey termed "short bursts of inconsequential information." He was damn spot-on about the inconsequential part. Twitter quickly developed into the ultimate narcissism-enabling machine for self-important people, famous or not. I remember back around 2007-08 avoiding Twitter like the plague; the idea of sharing my inconsequential bursts of mental runoff to complete strangers seemed quite bizarre to me. I much preferred the comfy-cozy personal atmosphere of facebook where I could share those silly little brain farts with people I actually knew IRL. The whole point of Twitter anyway was to be a place where you could follow the mental runoff of people with some degree of name recognition; there you are either a member of the Celeb and Techie Nomenklatura or you are a Follower. In other words, you either follow a lot of people, or have lots of followers. Dorsey and co. soon introduced the now-infamous "blue checkmark" which is a verification tick to signify that a user has verified their real identity with the site's staff. In function though, the blue check means you are a public figure whom the Twitterati approves of, probably because you have the "right" opinions (see: Silicon Valley shitlib culture). Today, in the thick of the culture wars raging, the Silicon Valley PC puritan hall monitor will yank away that blue check in heartbeat if you are deemed as someone who has the "wrong" opinions. Anyway I could ramble on about Twitter for awhile, but I won't here. I've never had a Twitter account with more than 100 followers anyway, thus by mental or emotional investment in the platform is pretty much nil.
I'll be getting more into Facebook in subsequent updates, after I pen my thoughts regarding the Mobile era that has supplanted the the Internet Golden Age. And then I'll talk about my overall impressions of how this all fits together.
