mood genuinely nostalgic
So I have been desperately trying to find cliques and web rings to join for this thing, and Christ, is it ever like hunting needles in a haystack. Pardon the cliché.
I found this on an LJ community called oldschoolers:We gave out the awards, joined the webrings, and ran cliques. We were the first to buy domain names (delish, siren, choirgirl, gemz) & the first to start journals. We had exotic pseudonyms, which we changed nearly as often as our website layouts. Our pages resided on servers like Geocities, Tripod, Xoom, and Eccentrica, before the days of watermarks and pop-up window advertisements and "getting hosted!".
We remember what things were like in 1996.
We remember pre-56k modems. IRC. ICQ. Web-Based FTP. And most of all, friendship, that no one, especially people "IRL" could understand.
Now, while the latter paragraph of the above excerpt is about a year and an upgrade my senior, this description still hit home. Before register-log-in-and-type blog sites (and MySpace) doled out foolproof webspace to anyone with an Internet connection, the landscape was totally awesome. There were once epic congregations of amazingly talented indie web designers, some artsy and cryptic, some tuff and tongue-in-cheek; regardless of angle, they were all designing sites simply to indulge their delusions of artistic grandeur. I loved it. I was a part of it.
Today as I dig through any and all personal domain and hostee sites I can pull up, the magic is gone. Everything smacks of templates, of fanfic, of pre-generated PHP voodoo nonsense. Cliques and web rings are now mass-produced fanlistings and link exchanges. Quirky domain names house boring Photoshop-blend-and-float-table blogs -- or worse, they redirect to paid LiveJournal accounts. Even musicians and celebrities are foregoing a good ol' web site in favor of a MySpace. Where is the COOL Internet? Where all the pseudo-intellectuals, art-fags, e-revolutionaries and disaffected egotists?!
Cherry on top, any site worth noting was on indefinite hiatus or simply "Last Updated: 2005" or whatever. Dead links lay everywhere, sending curious clickers to terrific domain names now wasted as link farms or "Available at GoDaddy.com!" Not only are these sites dead, their corpses and paper trails are still lying around everywhere to signify relatively recent demise. It's so morbid.
What we know now is most certainly the "age of personal media" (Saffo) better realized -- the Internet democratized. But what I still remember, and what I now achingly miss, is the Golden Age of Personal Media. To see that it has flatlined was disheartening at first, but now I've been inspired to make this space EVEN BETTER. And if Roxbert ends up dumping this space, I won't hesitate to seek hosting from a kindred spirit still brandishing her domain, paying tribute to an unfortunately obsolete era.