Digital Anthropology: Is Web 2.0 an Idiocracy?
If you are like me you might come from a generation that was raised online before the boom of social networking sites. The Internet was once a secret room that only the freaks could experience. We were trolling before it was called trolling and we didn't do it for mob sport but intellectual exercise. My first exposure to the Internet was through a free text-based service where you could view alt.newsgroups and send email through a program called Pine. There was no world wide Internet that I could see from miles away.
I remember the act of "scrolling" which was placing ASCII skulls and bongs in AOL chatrooms. A/S/L anyone? I remember deleting the information on AOL discs and putting new material on them. I got suspended in elementary school for "hacking" when I brought these discs into class. Of course it was only a matter of time before people saw outside of Plato's Cave so when Truman decided to get out of AOL and saw the mountain called the Internet a company called Geocities began hosting websites. (also known as "Geoshitties") At the same time a bunch geeks like myself were starting our own domains and creating our own content to express ourselves and meet new people. We had no real life friends which was common in early Internet culture. The digital world was like a bar for the socially inept and we were all the bartenders.
The Make Out Club was founded in 1999 and considered to be the first popular social networking site. It was the site that everyone who had their own domain made fun of. After this came LiveJournal which was practically a subculture in itself and the place where I launched my project Acidexia. Next there was Friendster which was the first time the Internet truly opened its doors to the general public. I remember enjoying Friendster because cyberculture was coming into human form. People were dressed up like cyborgs in their profile pictures and you could find them out at clubs dressed the same way.
A lot of people consider Myspace the downfall of the Internet and in many ways I am inclined to agree. Yet I remember when Myspace was cool and it was a great way to meet other musicians. I could always search for Industrial artists in my area. It was a great way to get feedback on my music and present Experiment Haywire to the general public. When Myspace died there was no longer a central community for musicians and to this day the closest thing we have is SoundCloud. Of course Myspace did open the flood gates for a lot of idiots. It's hard to deny that through the creation of Myspace the general IQ of the Internet population dropped at least 40 points.
The Internet was becoming a fancy strip mall full of ugly icons and flashing lights. With the creation of Twitter (which I'm still not convinced wasn't predicted by William Gibson in Pattern Recognition) the Internet was now a business in which memes were an economic transaction and hastags were the key to success. The Web 2.0 was beginning to form. There was also Facebook which overthrew Myspace and introduced us to apps. Facebook wasn't too bad when it first started out but with the rapid growth of the Internet it became the Orwellian conspiracy we all feared. With the rise of the iPhone and Droid it was clear that Facebook was making itself a forced connection to the digital world. Flashbacks to AOL anyone?
There is hope that Google+ will kill Facebook once and for all. In fact it is almost like Google+ has become Obama and since Google+ is not Bush everybody is voting for it. Yet I don't see anything Google+ing Twitter. Maybe this means that Twitter is here to stay for a while. It turned the Internet into a popular business tool which I now see as a good thing. Information-as-currency is a subject that has always fascinated me. I love going to conferences and contributing to discussion feeds. Maybe the Internet has not become an Idiocracy like it appears to have become on Facebook. As people who used the Internet in the early days we have now grown up and are utilizing our digital knowledge to help a new generation.
I remember the act of "scrolling" which was placing ASCII skulls and bongs in AOL chatrooms. A/S/L anyone? I remember deleting the information on AOL discs and putting new material on them. I got suspended in elementary school for "hacking" when I brought these discs into class. Of course it was only a matter of time before people saw outside of Plato's Cave so when Truman decided to get out of AOL and saw the mountain called the Internet a company called Geocities began hosting websites. (also known as "Geoshitties") At the same time a bunch geeks like myself were starting our own domains and creating our own content to express ourselves and meet new people. We had no real life friends which was common in early Internet culture. The digital world was like a bar for the socially inept and we were all the bartenders.
The Make Out Club was founded in 1999 and considered to be the first popular social networking site. It was the site that everyone who had their own domain made fun of. After this came LiveJournal which was practically a subculture in itself and the place where I launched my project Acidexia. Next there was Friendster which was the first time the Internet truly opened its doors to the general public. I remember enjoying Friendster because cyberculture was coming into human form. People were dressed up like cyborgs in their profile pictures and you could find them out at clubs dressed the same way.
A lot of people consider Myspace the downfall of the Internet and in many ways I am inclined to agree. Yet I remember when Myspace was cool and it was a great way to meet other musicians. I could always search for Industrial artists in my area. It was a great way to get feedback on my music and present Experiment Haywire to the general public. When Myspace died there was no longer a central community for musicians and to this day the closest thing we have is SoundCloud. Of course Myspace did open the flood gates for a lot of idiots. It's hard to deny that through the creation of Myspace the general IQ of the Internet population dropped at least 40 points.
The Internet was becoming a fancy strip mall full of ugly icons and flashing lights. With the creation of Twitter (which I'm still not convinced wasn't predicted by William Gibson in Pattern Recognition) the Internet was now a business in which memes were an economic transaction and hastags were the key to success. The Web 2.0 was beginning to form. There was also Facebook which overthrew Myspace and introduced us to apps. Facebook wasn't too bad when it first started out but with the rapid growth of the Internet it became the Orwellian conspiracy we all feared. With the rise of the iPhone and Droid it was clear that Facebook was making itself a forced connection to the digital world. Flashbacks to AOL anyone?
There is hope that Google+ will kill Facebook once and for all. In fact it is almost like Google+ has become Obama and since Google+ is not Bush everybody is voting for it. Yet I don't see anything Google+ing Twitter. Maybe this means that Twitter is here to stay for a while. It turned the Internet into a popular business tool which I now see as a good thing. Information-as-currency is a subject that has always fascinated me. I love going to conferences and contributing to discussion feeds. Maybe the Internet has not become an Idiocracy like it appears to have become on Facebook. As people who used the Internet in the early days we have now grown up and are utilizing our digital knowledge to help a new generation.