Let’s try a different tack. Weekly Ask Me Anything posts are kind of pointless IMO. So, I’ll reverse the tables and ask you, my dear readers, questions.
Credit for this comic goes to xkcd.com.
Here are some questions to get you started off. Don’t regard these questions as hard-and-fast ones. They’re just starting points in a conversation. Feel free to be as long-winded or short-and-to-the-point as necessary.
- When did you begin using the Internet?
- What was it like back then?
- What did you do on the Internet back then? What do you currently do on the Internet?
- Do you feel that the Internet has changed dramatically since you were first online, or is it pretty much the same now as it was back then?
- If you could change anything about the Internet, what would you change?
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7 Comments
Well, since you asked nicely, Max, I shall respond! Unless this is a trap to see if old people like myself read your blog, and regale you of stories of how I loved using Archie and USENET and how Tim Berners-Lee ruined it for everyone with his ‘web’ thingamajig. Wait, did I just out myself as an old person?
Anyway, on with the questions!
1. I started using the internet in 1995 on my trusty old 486, using Trumpet Winsock on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 to connect and Netscape Navigator to browse this new-fangled thing that was the world wide web. My first modem was a 28.8 kbps clunker (perhaps not even that… I recall it being even slower) which dialled in on a phone line with that SKREEEBEEPBOOP sound.
2. It felt like frontier-land, and everyone was so optimistic about the future of humanity in this BIG NEW AGE OF INSTANT COMMUNICATION. It was right in the middle of the dot com bubble and everyone and their dog was rushing to build a web presence. Thee stuff we used to use then were Netscape and Altavista. Kids put up their websites on Geocities, and we used Eudora Light for email. I saw the emergence of webmail, the rise of “hotmail” and how Microsoft rapidly snapped it up. Chat was mainly on irc, and discussion forums took place on USENET. Even Google wasn’t around yet! Wow, I feel old.
3. I think I pretty much use the internet for the same things I used to use it for. Dicussion forums, chatrooms, downloading free software… the “Web 2.0″ moniker for what people call “participatory internet” seems like a superfluous label to me. The internet has always been participatory. Perhaps the only difference is that today’s technologies make it easier. I had a blog even before I even knew what a blog was; In 2000 I just wrote my own web app that lets me post things as a stream of updates from web forms, and thought this was a perfectly logical way to do it. This was before I discovered that it was more efficient to sign up for a blogging service instead of writing your own code to do it.
4. I’d say the internet has “grown” rather than “changed” (however you could argue that growth is a subset of change). There used to be so much fewer people, but now there are so so many. The internet has given birth to many wonderful and horrific things (or both). Thanks to the internet we have Linux, rickrolling, goatse.cx, Facebook, Twitter, viral videos, Justin Bieber, webcomics, warez and cloud computing. Whether or not these things are wonderful and/or horrific is left as an exercise for the reader.
5. Oh if I could change the way the internet worked I’d have started off with something like IPv6 from the get-go. I’d also have used secure sockets as the standard, so that everything is encrypted. Email should have been encrypted from the beginning. But otherwise, I’m quite happy with what the internet has grown into.
About 1995 – it looked like this (blip.tv video; uncaptioned, I linked for the look) at its best (and at its worst was bad geocities homepages with moving gifs v.v ) and people were still predicting its upcoming failure. (thenextweb.com, reminiscing on a Newsweek article)
It was also far more text oriented.
Forums (rpg stuff, later queer stuff), email, lots and lots of reading on anything and everything. And yes it has changed, tremendously. Mostly for the better. Except for a few things where it got worse.
More accessibility, less borders, a much lower cost of entry: make the world part of worldwide web a fact instead of a dream.
I came to the internet rather late, maybe in 2001. I didn’t have a computer of my own with any decent specs until 2002 (before that I was tooling around with one gig of HDD space).
I don’t think the internet was so drastically different, but then I remember this is before Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, RSS, Wikipedia, WordPress, Reddit, or really any of the sites that part of my daily experience existed. Google was still an experiment I had yet to hear about. ICQ was still around and was a big way people communicated online. Maybe I could say it was before an Age of Reason where the internet was laid bare for public consumption and still had a bit of magic in it: It was a rather unknown space teeming with ideas and sites that are lost to time now that the Dot-Com Bubble has burst and is a memory. I got to join in its evolution, got Gmail invites when they were new, checked out Facebook when I was doing college and it was still exclusive, learned how to make sites when the internet was still figuring out what exactly the best way to do this was.
Back then, I came to the internet full of curiosity and loved meeting new people. Social interaction dominated my day, finding and participating in communities full of people my age that loved things I loved. I could come online and interact, and I was a teenager badly in need of that. At first it was a Christian chat, and then it moved to role-playing chats. These days it’s not so different, and a lot of the contacts I have online are remnants (in one way or another) of that time. I look at new communities based on my changing interests, and I find ways to integrate the internet into my real life, rather than keeping it segregated into an online world only.
I think the internet has matured a great deal at the same time that I have. Maybe we came of age at the same time. I feel like designs and applications online have become mature and elaborate, and I’m amazed at how things are put together now as opposed to anything circa the year 2001. Thinking about what’s come to exist in this time and how it’s become a part of most people’s lives reminds me that it is rather drastic, even in this short decade. I guess I became a part of the internet which was trying to find itself.
Any way I might choose to improve or change the internet is probably something someone’s already working on. I’m not sure anything comes to mind, though. I wish there were a more coherent focus on the technologies and standards upon which things were built, letting browsers agree on how they work better and moving old legacy technology (stateless HTTP connections, IPv4, etc) to newer iterations more quickly, bringing everybody up to speed. But maybe the chaos is part of what makes everything exciting and fun.
(Mind if I write up this comment and this idea for a post of my own? It’d be interesting to expand and link back to you.)
No, I don’t mind at all. It was interesting to read this comment & I’d be interested to see what you have to say. :)
I’ve posted my response. You’ll probably see the trackback, but you can also find the link here: http://www.zubon.org/420
I know I’m about a year late answering this question, but maybe you’ll see it and get to read it. (Interestingly enough, I came upon this googling exactly what the comic’s title text told me not to google.)
I was still a young kid when I first started using the internet, back in the days of AOL 4.0, I believe. Don’t remember how old I was, though I was born December 7th, 1990, so maybe that will help you tell me.
As a kid, I saw the internet as an amazing place. You could talk with anyone who logged on, and start up chats with a random person and maybe get to be friends.
Unfortunately, since I’m not a social person, I didn’t actually use it for talking to people. I just played whatever games I could find. Maybe I would talk in the occasional chat room or sign on to small forums, but I didn’t really do much aside from that. I was a kid, what else would you expect? X3
As for what I do on the internet now… I’m still not a very social person, but there are a few people I talk with regularly online. I don’t mess with social networking sites that much, maybe the occasional tweet, but that’s it. Aside from that, I use it for GameFAQs when I’m stuck on games and need help, and managing my Let’s Play videos (and watching them) on Youtube.
I’d say the internet has grown more than changed. There’s a LOT more games on the internet now that pretty much anyone can make them (though it takes skill to make a good one), social networking sites make it easy for people to find people to talk to all over the world (though language barriers get annoying fast). and there’s a lot of knowledge stored around on the web, provided you can find a page that wasn’t written by a troll or something.
I’d say if I could change anything that wouldn’t involve doing programming work or other related things (since I’m already spending more of my time writing code for games than I’d like to lately), I’d say it would be what could pass for advertising. So many ads lately are advertising things they really can’t promise, and most of them likely just lead to ways that your computer could be harmed.
Internet security would be nice and all, but in the end, user judgment is the first line of defense against viruses. And the advertisements are not helping this at all.
That was really interesting! Thanks for the response!
I guess that I’m such a social person that it never really occurred to me that people wouldn’t use the Internet primarily to chat. But it makes sense. So, thanks for your perspective :)
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