Where has the Internet gone?
scarfboy recently linked to a feature article from the New York Magazine about the culture shift happening online, examining it in terms of a generation gap (warning: it’s long!). Reading its exploration of a “younger” generation’s candour and frankness in sharing all sorts of aspects of our lives, I’ve been thinking about my own participation in this shift.
I’ve been using the Internet since I first telnetted out of the pusdata BBS to awol.com in 1995. That was my exposure to email, chat (we called it “teleconferencing” back then), and forums. Not long after, the first PPP dialup ISPs opened up in Jakarta, and I was hacking out HTML (mostly egged on by a combination of lordmortis and my own piscean ego. I had a page on geocities, which I stuck to until about 1997, when a friend moved to Carnegie-Melon and got me some space there. It’s moved around a lot, but now I host my own stuff, of which there is little left.
It’s the fact that there’s little of my own stuff left which got me thinking. The article goes on about a whole generation of people (many of the people interviewed are my age or a little younger) who have got day-by-day accounts of their lives from middle school until this very moment. Maybe my sample size is too small, but I don’t know if I could name a person in my immediate circle of friends who does all that.
I’ve been thinking that perhaps I’m just getting old - my poetry sounds juvenile and embarrassing, I’ve never posted to my flickr account because I’m not entirely comfortable with people leeching my artsy ones and passing judgements on the candids. I don’t post on forums any more (ZGeek stopped being fun about 3 years ago), and barely use chat, even though I have accounts on 5 services).
Still, I’m not immune to the web 2.0 lure - I have a livejournal, make regular use of last.fm. And I’ve still got some old web 1.0 stuff out there - some photos and other odds and sods.
Apart from laziness, one thing that stops me from doing all this is being scared of a lack of creativity and insight. I don’t want to put just any crap out there for the world to see. If I get linked to, I want it to be for something amazing. When I was in high school, the bar was set a lot lower because the net was a small place. We didn’t have to worry about spam; we used the mailto: link frequently - and frequently got feedback from complete strangers. We made new and interesting friends using the ICQ search engines.
In the old days, having your own domain was the pinnacle of internet fame (or so it seemed), because you had a quick and catchy URL. These days, it’s better to use a community site like LJ, flickr, MySpace, or similar because these sites connect you to your audience right away. Somehow I got left behind. I continue to marvel when I visit promotional websites for movies and bands and see links to MySpace profiles.
Maybe I should experiment and see what happens if I open up a little bit - become a little less self-conscious and put something out there for people to see.
I’ve been using the Internet since I first telnetted out of the pusdata BBS to awol.com in 1995. That was my exposure to email, chat (we called it “teleconferencing” back then), and forums. Not long after, the first PPP dialup ISPs opened up in Jakarta, and I was hacking out HTML (mostly egged on by a combination of lordmortis and my own piscean ego. I had a page on geocities, which I stuck to until about 1997, when a friend moved to Carnegie-Melon and got me some space there. It’s moved around a lot, but now I host my own stuff, of which there is little left.
It’s the fact that there’s little of my own stuff left which got me thinking. The article goes on about a whole generation of people (many of the people interviewed are my age or a little younger) who have got day-by-day accounts of their lives from middle school until this very moment. Maybe my sample size is too small, but I don’t know if I could name a person in my immediate circle of friends who does all that.
I’ve been thinking that perhaps I’m just getting old - my poetry sounds juvenile and embarrassing, I’ve never posted to my flickr account because I’m not entirely comfortable with people leeching my artsy ones and passing judgements on the candids. I don’t post on forums any more (ZGeek stopped being fun about 3 years ago), and barely use chat, even though I have accounts on 5 services).
Still, I’m not immune to the web 2.0 lure - I have a livejournal, make regular use of last.fm. And I’ve still got some old web 1.0 stuff out there - some photos and other odds and sods.
Apart from laziness, one thing that stops me from doing all this is being scared of a lack of creativity and insight. I don’t want to put just any crap out there for the world to see. If I get linked to, I want it to be for something amazing. When I was in high school, the bar was set a lot lower because the net was a small place. We didn’t have to worry about spam; we used the mailto: link frequently - and frequently got feedback from complete strangers. We made new and interesting friends using the ICQ search engines.
In the old days, having your own domain was the pinnacle of internet fame (or so it seemed), because you had a quick and catchy URL. These days, it’s better to use a community site like LJ, flickr, MySpace, or similar because these sites connect you to your audience right away. Somehow I got left behind. I continue to marvel when I visit promotional websites for movies and bands and see links to MySpace profiles.
Maybe I should experiment and see what happens if I open up a little bit - become a little less self-conscious and put something out there for people to see.