
Nostalgia for the Early Internet: A Creative Frontier
I’m old enough that I remember the early days of the Internet and more importantly, I lived through the various iterations of how we organized and indexed what’s on the Internet. When I was 15 my mom brought home our first computer, complete with a subscription to dial up Internet. At the time, the World Wide Web felt like this immense tapestry of humanity, woven with creativity and human interaction and curiosity. Through the rear view mirror from the 21st century, that same early Internet feels impossibly small compared to the digital monolith it has become.
For those of you who remember those early days, you might remember search engines being broken down by category. Google had this option to browse by category and I loved it. It really kind of set up my habits for how I search for information, in that, I feel compelled to see *everything* and then let my own curiosity decide how to whittle that down. A few years ago I was shopping for a coffee table on a popular furniture website and it continuously forced me to prove my humanity because apparently my search style of wanting to see *all* of my options made me look like a robot.
I’m nostalgic for the early Internet, as I’m sure a lot of you are, as a sort of digital frontier. It wasn’t sure what it was going to be yet, so it was a little bit of everything. We all set out and added to it by making our first websites, selling things on eBay, and connecting with people around the world. At 15 years old I made my first website. It was a Tom Green fan site that I called Wendy’s Tom Green World and I built it on Homestead.com. It was disabled years ago, thrown away into the great online dumpster because I didn’t log in for long enough. I followed that up with another website I won’t mention the name of —because it still exists — but I was 16 and it was cringe as hell so I don’t want anyone Googling and finding it (I just tested and it can indeed be found still with a quick search of its name) but it housed my poetry, short stories, and art.
I’ve had blogs and sites throughout every phase of my adulthood, the most successful being A Girl Named Wendy, where I started blogging during my pregnancy, but the blog quickly evolved into one where I explored my own grief after my son’s father passed away a few weeks after he was born. This very vulnerable and raw side of me started to get so much attention that it freaked me out and I quit. I guess what I’m getting at is that I’ve left my own trail of binary code across this vast web and I’m no stranger to this space.
But, this space isn’t what it used to be. What started as something so rich in creativity and humanity has become quite the opposite. Algorithms tell us what they think we want to see. I could Google something and you could Google the exact same thing and we might both get different results, and this is great and helpful if you’re searching for a store and only want results that are close by, but this becomes problematic when your search is for something scientific or political. The Internet isn’t the same for everyone in the way it used to be. It’s so much bigger but it feels less diverse. We’ve been commodified by using free websites and apps that sell our data to huge corporations so they can more easily work their way into our wallets. Algorithms predict our behavior and homogenize our experience by feeding us more of the same. It’s become so challenging to find unbiased information because bias has been worked into the very fabric of how we search.
AI is the natural progression of this. It “learns” by consuming what’s already out there and then combines it in different ways and gives it back to us. Again, I see where this can be beneficial and a useful tool, but it’s also being used in a lot of ways that I think take away from our humanity and add to the overall degradation of our minds. Now, I might be biased on this one, but training AI to learn from artists and then pumping out images not only devalues art as a whole but it removes human creativity and expression, which means it isn’t art at all. I feel the same way about other forms of art, like music or writing. Let’s let the AI do the boring stuff and leave the artistic expression to humans.
I’m finding it more important for myself to take breaks from online consumption and my online presence. I don’t like algorithms telling me what it thinks I want to hear. I want to decide for myself. So much of what is out there is designed to manipulate and it’s just not healthy for me to be exposing myself to that all the time. I’m really interested in what you think too. If you remember the early days of the Internet, have you noticed what I’ve noticed? Do you have a different perspective? Where do you see the Internet in 5 years? 10 years? Please leave me a comment with your thoughts because this is a discussion that has long fascinated me.
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2 Comments
taylor delong
some lovely insight, both into the evolution of the web and to who you are as a person. thanks for sharing and i hope to see more of your writing soon
Wendy Blacke
Thank you so much for reading. More to come very soon 🙂