For now, there'll be minimal CSS fancy stuff to this page.
I just want to get my thoughts out of my system. I've already
seen a good bunch of those manifestos from the Yesterweb ring,
and wanted to put down my own thoughts the same way those wonderful
people did.
TLDR; The dry rot of the internet experience is from capitalism,
Social Media is not a social medium, and
Mass communication thru the gateway of Social Media has fucked up the social growth of humanity.
My experience with the "old web" is generally limited. Any interaction I had with the internet
was a hodge-podge of the boxy family computer i would use to draw on MS Paint, to watching
Youtube speedpaints of my favorite characters or Lets Players, to playing online community
games like Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, or Cool Math Games. Social media was the furthest from my
field of vision- the most interaction I had with it was my mother posting holiday/vacation family
photos on Facebook.The internet was a tool, that much I could tell as a kid. But it was also as
much a canvas as the paintbrush.
There was a broad freedom to the internet; one that took me getting a bit older to put words to.
A person's experience browsing websites, exploring what the WWW had to offer, was theirs to control.
That freedom had pros and cons: there was so much you could do! But only so much you were aware of.
It was great for finding niches, then expanding on those topics through forums/websites you found
that held links to fansites broiled and bronzed by devoted webmasters into pages of content- even if it was
pages of bullshit! It was real people's presences on the internet, for the sake of creativity, and not
for the sake of content or profit.
To be 100% honest, the presence of that truly World-Wide web in my life was very small, growing up.
I was born in 2005, in the post-Katrina suburbs of Louisiana. Having a computer was a luxury at first,
then a common work/entertainment device- now it's so commonplace as a tool it's become a necessity.
Even if I scratched the surface of the 1.0 Web growing up, i hardly remember it in full. But what that
web promised, and what the internet provides today, are two entirely different things. Hearing about
"The Good Old Days" of the internet secondhand, where you "explored", you "browsed"; the experience of
the internet was one big long journey, as you discovered the interesting sites along the way. I want
that experience. I didn't get to taste the first wave of it during the og Web 1.0, but that doesn't mean
I can't do it now.
To learn more HTML/CSS, check out these tutorials!