The evolution of my time on the internet. I started to think about this subject and write on it a couple of years ago. I never did quite finish what I wanted to say. But recently someone started a Facebook group that pulled together all the old school E/N community, and it got me thinking….
I’ve been using the internet as a mode of communication, entertainment, and escape since 1994. I remember installing AOL 1.0 and having only two things you could do: Join a Chatroom, or send an IM. The first person I ever talked to was named “ToolTime19” and I was “NJPUNK1”. They asked me how old I was and I told them that I was 14 years old. They asked if I liked older boys and my first official internet creeper interaction had begun. I quickly ignored that guy as I was just looking for places to play Text-based MUD’s and pretend I’m a dwarf that always wears sunglasses. I mean, seriously, boys still have cooties.
The only picture I had at all online for like 2 years, haha.
AOL led me to the wonders of “Punk Chat” and “Marilyn Manson” chat. Here I had met other people my age, an inordinate amount of them who actually lived in NJ, and some of which I keep in touch with even today! I was a teenager in a catholic high school in NJ who just wasn’t relating a lot to my peers. I had a hard time making friends in school, and this was just what I needed. It was a connection to other people in a similar situation as me. It was fantastic! I knew only a few others in school that were also on-line at the time, it was so niche. A few of us would start doing the whole pen-pal thing as well. So here we are, cutting edge, but still holding onto the tangible goodness of a real live letter in an envelope. I always treasured getting mail from folks during this time.
“BUT AOL SUX D00D GO ON IRC!” What? Some of my friends told me about how much AOL sucked, and that I should go there. So I checked it out. I popped onto DalNet and a cursory channel search showed me #punk and #oi. I was into local music and NJ Punk and Ska at the time so it seemed the logical choice. There was this rich community of people who had been going here and talking with each other for years! They had a website with everyone’s username, pictures and bios. It was a real community. Again, these were people I could relate to. Internet Cowboys blazing the trails with ROFLCopters.
Then I started going on a website called WBS. It was a chat room, but people could have pictures next to their names. I remember at this time I only had one picture that was scanned online by a friend of mine. (see below). It was just awful. Here I met one of my good friends, Rhiannon. She always amazed me because she had this mystical technology called a “Webcam”. So every day she had a new, funny and interesting photo on the site. She was really creative and it was obvious from her conversation and presentation. I was so jealous!! She motivated me to go ahead and get a webcam myself. WBS had a lot of steam for a long time, but eventually I think it was bought by Infoseek and the regulars stopped being around.
One of my AMAZING PicPage Side pic photoshops
Next was PicPage. It’s so crazy how much timing has to do with the success of something. There were personalized pictures, profiles, and an interactive chat room. It was REALLY close to being what MySpace and Friendster started as. It was coded by one individual and the community was really interactive and fun. The big thing here was photoshopping your own crazy side pictures. For some reason everyone was so into photoshop, it was fun.
Here’s some particularly amazing (terrible) gems:
I suppose you can see why I named this site emo crap.
Obviously.
Queen of contrast
I was so proud of this...
An opening splash image to one of my first personal sites. That lens flare, not ironic.
Sort of munged around in this time was the era of personal websites. My first ever sites were hosted on geocities. I had a 311 unofficial fan page, which I actually was quite proud of. I remember I was contacted by the 311 fan club once about it and I was so incredibly psyched. My next page was an homage to punk/ska music where I had tons of fun little animated gifs of rude boys & such. Gosh I wish I saved those files. But then… shit got real. Music, happy things? NO… this could not be what the internet saw. I have backups of two of my earlier websites (BAD BAD Poetry) – (Weird). So as you can see, the lens flare totally makes a lot of sense now. I continued on the path of these esoteric type random websites just showcasing my teenage angst until I discovered “Everything/Nothing”
E/N. The wonderful days of “Everything/Nothing” sites. The days of personal journals, cam girls, forums, and entertainment sites were king. The internet had so much real estate and there were so many creative people scrambling to make their mark. People were coding their sites in Notepad, with fresh and original layouts for all the sites. The community was really strong with everyone cross linking to one another’s sites, posting on each other’s forums, and being on each other’s cam portals. The community sprung up from a group of folks all looking to just get themselves out there in one way shape or form. It was a pretty great community and from it I’ve made some awesome friends. It’s kind of a shame that things died down a bit as the dawning of “create your own profile” pages started to spring up. Now what was formerly known as “Everything/Nothing” is called a “blog”.
Using a webcam to document my adventures through idiocy.
A popular thing during this time was to setup a “webcam” where you would upload new pictures every so often of you sitting in front of the computer doing various things. This ranged from being G-Rated to X-Rated. The term “camgirls” was coined, even though there were a fair amount of guys doing the very same thing. The popularity of these cams really were the predecessor of “Reality Television”. You could really get more of an insight into someone’s day to day this way. Riding on that popularity a popular internet writer named Bertie came up with the idea for “Survivorcam”. Survivorcam was an AWESOME internet game show where folks competed much like the show survivor. It was one of the most fun and original things I had the pleasure of being a part of on this interweb of mine. Camming has morphed into Video Blogging which is a current phenom on youtube, but something that I have not yet ventured towards.
Friendster. Oh Friendster. This was the beginning of the isolation era, as I call it. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, they all promoted you to interact with people you already knew! With privacy settings and access to friends only, things started to get locked down. Sure, these all helped me to keep in touch with friends I already had, and acquaintances that might have faded completely out of my life otherwise. But I wasn’t on the internet to interact with people I could see at work or school. I was there to shout from the mountaintops, declare my thoughts and opinions, and for political correctness to be damned. Friendster was pretty short lived in it’s day before MySpace took over. MySpace was this really weird mix of Friendster and a personal page. There was so much HTML customization you could turn it into a little e/n site encapsulated in this built in community tool. I thought nothing could stop MySpace….
Until Facebook. Facebook has become such an integral part of our daily lives, it’s unbelievable. Keeping in touch, event planning, making new friends, and so much more is facilitated through this social medium. But it’s accessibility meant that everyone is on it. Your siblings, parents, co-workers, school mates, etc. All of a sudden blurting out anything you were thinking or trolling people for fun wasn’t such a good idea anymore. Now you had to worry about the awkward follow up interaction that comes after you posted something unintentionally offensive on someone’s random Facebook status. But Facebook is really what brought me full circle. Through Facebook I was just able to get in touch with a large amount of internet folks that I thought I’d never hear about again. People that could so easily have slipped away into the nether of a memory. (deep). But here they are! So I suppose Facebook has it’s purpose in this world and I do love it for that.
However, I miss the old days. The internet used to be a place that represented freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to be a weirdo, and freedom of style and choice. I miss when the experience you had going to a site was a completely unique one to the way that the webmaster chose to ran it. I miss the days when someone like Seanbaby was running an amazingly creative and interesting entertainment site, all by himself. I miss the forums, the sense of community. It’s like we were all in it together. All of us just filled with stuff we had to get out. People who were on the internet were all on it for similar reasons. You could find solace and comfort in folks that you hardly knew. It was pretty great. Now everyone’s online, and not everyone cares about that community, or even fostering friendships that they used to.
Call me a cranky old man, but I miss it.
