fatpinocchio:

We used to have high-contrast pixelated globe icons and pictures of people surfing on keyboards!

we used to have contact pages with both e-mail addresses and forms that would send a message by e-mail

isaacsapphire:

HOTorNOT: The forgotten website that shaped the internet

Anybody else vaguely remember Hot or Not? @kontextmaschine ?

bogleech:

You: uhhhhh hi I’m new i guess, just wanna chat about my favorite show too or whatever

iNvAd3rJ1M posted: *pounces* HELLOoOOOO NEW PERSON!!! *throws confetti*

911_NVR-FRGT posted: Hi there! You’ll find a Relaxed Atmosphere Here in Our Community! *points* Beer is In The Fridge, Curfew Is At 9! Haha I’m old

SSJgoku1994 posted: I am a pineapple! Monkeys!!!!!

Drag0n~Swords posted: Forsooth, a stranger doth enter the realm!

dumbledoreftw posted: Welcome! Hope you stick around! We don’t bite….. much!!

Greg posted: HITLER WAS A MISUNDERSTOOD GENIUS AND ILL GIVE YOUR WHOLE FAMILY AIDS IN HELL YOU PIECE OF SHIT

Lady*Unicorns*76 posted: “lol” (Laughing Out Loud!) don’t worry about greg sweetie! He’s just our little pet troll and you get used to him!! ;-) <3<3<3

A eulogy for Shakesville (posing Melissa McEwan as sympathetically, fundamentally ridiculous) that’s basically a eulogy for web 1.5 and a reminder that life before social media was just the same shit at different scale

best-blurst-of-times:

“It is no surprise that the dominant perception of space, marked by discourses of property and nationality, continue to hold sway even among those who seek to transform it. But, as Benjamin put it, when the old temporality is interrupted in a fundamental way, this perception will also be interrupted, by a ‘historical time-lapse camera’ – a new image of time that will reorient our perception of space. This is especially important, since for individuals time is marked by a succession of affective attachments that overgird one another in ever deepening layers over the course of a lifespan. Those who mobilized or were swept up by the movements of the late 1960s, for instance, necessarily experience subsequent events differently from those who came of age in the late 1990s.”

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/occupy-time

kontextmaschine:

through the years realized that through whatever blind groping the ‘90s-ass “edgelords” were desperately trying to save us from this, through proper gatekeeping and filtering

and at first I’d thought it was gratuitous and supported it being relaxed, maybe not shaming everyone who publicly mourned a suicide, mea culpa, mea culpa, I have debts to pay

>@siliquasquama​ said: wait, what are we being saved from? The public mourning of the suicides of famous people?

exactly

>@tsukutsukuboshi said: seconding the question of what’s been so bad about the public reaction

>@russian-hackers-official said: yea what’s so bad about that

That was how we kept the internet culture from growing mawkish and cry-bullyish: basically, if you were so weak as to get weepy over corpsemeat you got cancelled, the shame would follow you forever and you’d never be allowed to forget it.

Like, you know how from now unto eternity, whenever Tim Buckley gets mentioned someone’s gonna heap shit on him for getting melodramatic and heavy about a character having a miscarriage? That but real. At the time I thought it was too much but ::gestures around::

One of the critical moments I remember most was when Gawker was young, still focused on Manhattan celebrity gossip and young-people-in-publishing industry news, and to comment on it you had to pass an “audition” and if your comments fell below par you’d be ceremoniously removed in Friday “Commenter Execution” posts

And there was some post about a toddler falling out of a high-rise Manhattan apartment window and dying, and some commenter referenced the classic Anal Cunt song “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck” (about Eric Clapton’s kid, who died the same way, inspiring “Tears in Heaven”) and some scold huffed that he should show some restraint because A Child Has Died, and then that scold was not featured in that week’s Commenter Executions and I was like “hmm, this is an ill omen”, and it was

Your Granddad On The Internet

I’ve been thinking, as I always am, about the 90s and how we got here from there

And one thing I thought about was the figure we used to have of Your Granddad On The Internet - who would include you and all your brothers and sisters and parents on long e-mail FWD: chains about things that were transparently false on their face, frequently conservative-themed, frequently in ALL CAPS

Because apparently such a critical mass of people on the internet had that exact experience with their exact grandfather that it was a trope. Which brings up two points:

1) “People circulating viral conservative misinformation to their family and friends on the internet” is not a phenomenon of social media, it was there well before

2) Though these people were on the internet, ubiquitous on the internet even, they weren’t of the internet. Little or none of it was made for them and there was a hegemonic Internet Culture that recognized them as outside it.

So what was really going on? Well, let’s try to define the issue by subtraction.

It wasn’t just that he was a granddad - there were STEM professor wizards who’d been on USENET since the early ‘80s, or grey ponytail hippies from The WELL or whatever, and not only were they part of The True Internet, they were its founders.

It wasn’t just that he was out of it, on a tech or social level. Maybe your dad was wasting your inheritance chasing his brilliant day trading hunches, maybe your mom was going on Focus on the Family forums to complain about TV shows treating homosexuality as just another way to live. Probably they were both Eternal September AOLers who would ask you troubleshooting questions revealing an astounding ignorance of how computers work and somehow expect a useful answer that respected that absurd model.

But if they weren’t part of The True Internet they weren’t really rogues against it, at some level they got how you were supposed to interact with the internet - you found the site or community that corresponded to your interest and pursued it there. If anything their posts and e-mails too formally followed letter-writing structure, and they may have made dumb or tautological arguments in support of their points but they had the sense they were supposed to make arguments.

It wasn’t just that he was obnoxious - the notion of the “troll” dates to USENET at least, as someone who says things to get a rise out of people, or to bait them into wasting time rebutting something. To “own” them, basically. And annoying or not, this was accepted as part of what the Internet is, one of the signal features of its culture, really. But even when you weren’t sure if Your Granddad On The Internet actually believed something he sent you or just passed it on to signal what side he was on and how fiercely, he wasn’t trying to “own” you, he REALLY WAS on that side, he wanted you to associate him with that position, and ideally join him.

It was probably at least in part being retired and having spare time and no other social outlet, back in the day going online meant going to a specific piece of furniture in a specific room of your home when no one else was using the computer and spending maybe 3 minutes just getting online, it was something you blocked off time to do. The young generation could just come home from school to the cul-de-sac and get online for lack of anything else to do, the parents’ generation was too busy to have enough uninterrupted time to become Extremely Online?

The thing I’m really wondering about is class. What was the cost of being Online back then? Say a new computer and modem every 4 years at around $2400 (Grandpa sure wasn’t building his own, but then he didn’t have to keep upgrading video cards either), $40 for an ISP, ideally $10 for another phone line? That’s $100/month, or alternately $50/mo and the ability to make $2.5k purchases on demand. And the kind of senior citizen who, in 1998, lived separately from his children, could swing this, would think to swing this, has multiple agemate peers and children’s households who did swing this, was a particular group. “Middle-middle” class AT LEAST and probably higher, probably went to college back when only 10% of people did.

BUT that doesn’t make sense. My theory is that this used to be a more marginal behavior on the internet, but if it’s gotten more common since the late ‘90s I don’t think it’s because the Internet has grown more full of wealthy old patriarchs since.

So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.

And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.

That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”

Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.

kontextmaschine:

You know which one, or which ones it might be softlinked to?

Shooting yourself in the head for fun and profit

(ed: found this before you linked me, anon, but you beat me to post)

When my father was in medical school, he did a rotation in the emergency room of a hospital in rural South Carolina.  He saw some seriously weird and horrible stuff during his time there, and heard about even more, but one of his stories in particular has stuck in my head.

There was a local guy who showed up with a bullet wound in the middle of his forehead.  It was a small-caliber, soft lead slug that hit and spread out across the bone in a nickel-sized circle without breaking it.  It was accompanied by a powder burn, which indicated he’d been shot at very close range.  The doctor cut the bloody lump of the bullet out, cleaned and bandaged the wound, and sent him home with a prescription for antibiotics and painkillers.

Several months later, he showed up at the ER with the same kind of gunshot wound.  And again, a few months after that.  And again and again.

It turned out that this guy had been going into crowded honky tonks and getting people to bet on whether he could shoot himself square in the head and walk away from it.  Figuring they wouldn’t have to owe any money to a dead man, people ponied up hundreds of dollars.

Once the pot was big enough, this guy would go out into the parking lot with the crowd of blood-lusty drunks in tow, pull out his pistol loaded with underpowered, soft ammo, and shoot himself point-blank in the forehead.

My father guesses that the first time, the guy was drunk and suicidally desperate.  When his ploy worked, he turned it into a regular bar bet moneymaking scheme.  My dad examined the guy after his fifth or sixth trip to the ER – he said that the skin of his forehead was thickly scarred, and that the bone was starting to build up in response to the repeated bullet impacts.  He also figured that he’d probably destroyed most of the pain nerves in his forehead (though of course the impact gave the guy a killer headache).

None of the ER doctors could convince this guy to stop shooting himself in the head.  It wasn’t just the money; this was apparently the only thing this guy was really good at.  He liked the charge of cheating death.  And he loved the expressions of horror, amazement, and frustrated anger he got from onlookers who’d paid their hard-earned cash to see a parking lot suicide.

I would fervently hope that none of the noders here would be thick-skulled enough to try a hugely dangerous stunt like this … or thick-skulled enough to succeed.

The Old Internet I Loved

What I Thought It Was:

A World Where Established Orders Were Rendered Superfluous, and In the Absence Of Coordinating Forces, A Congenial Culture Arose From The Free Interplay Of All the World’s Diverse Peoples

What It Was, Apparently:

A World So Hegemonically Dominated by People In a Similar Class and Cultural Position That Our Interests Were Simply Uncritically Adopted as Local Cultural Norms, Which Could Then Be Misread as the Sensibility of the World Entire

So uh I guess it was that second one I was fond of the whole time and saw as our salvation from a broken world?

So I remember 2 different periods of the web where it seemed like they were dominated by one particular advertiser

One was 2000-01, with the X10 wireless camera that was pitched as like a “nannycam” to watch your servants as a disclaimable front for clearly being intended for intrusive sexual voyeurism. Also they kind of made the “pop-under” ad where a new browser window opens but is not brought to front

The other was 2005ish SnorgTees, which were nerd-reference or double-nerd-reference t-shirts worn in vertical ads featuring these 23ish models with geek-girl hair acting bouncy and ignorant that they had E-cup tits

fengshuiofficecubicle:

Here’s my experience growing up in the global village. My friend and I had a shitty noise band and somehow we did a split with a band in Ecuador who we talked to on some forum (the singer’s wife would translate our conversations) and then ten years later I find some canadian noise zine did a review of our album and said it was terrible. Well, it was terrible.

through the years realized that through whatever blind groping the ‘90s-ass “edgelords” were desperately trying to save us from this, through proper gatekeeping and filtering

and at first I’d thought it was gratuitous and supported it being relaxed, maybe not shaming everyone who publicly mourned a suicide, mea culpa, mea culpa, I have debts to pay

light-rook:

obscuritory:

Essential post by Emilie Reed about multimedia CD-ROMs and how they’re related to modern messy indie game aesthetics.

The multimedia CD-ROM is a kind of exuberant over-response to the capability of digital devices to convey things that were previously experienced through different forms, images, text, video, sound, all-in-one. Often, these CD-ROMs were more about the fact that such a thing could now be done than whether the thing itself was actually useful.

I’m 100% here for messy terrines as a metaphor for “multimedia” early internet culture.

cfiesler:

Survey Results: Fan Platform Use over Time

Particularly for those who were kind enough to participate in our survey last week, or to share it even after we halted data collection (because we received so many responses so quickly!), I wanted to give you something interesting right away. As you know, the academic writing and publishing process can be lengthy, so who knows when you might get a full paper from us! But in the meantime, this was the analysis I did this weekend.

The survey asked for participants to indicate what platforms they use/used from a given list, and also to indicate a date range (e.g., Tumblr 2006-2018). I parsed those date ranges in order to determine for a given platform how many of our participants were active in a given year. (This actually gave me an excuse to write some code for the first time in years. Jupyter Notebooks are super cool.)

(Click on the image above for full resolution!)

The Y axis is number of survey participants who indicated using the platform during a given time, and the X axis is year. (This starts at 1990, though I’ll note there were 10-ish participants who indicated using usenet, email lists, and/or messageboards in the 1980s.)

Some interesting things to note:
(1) See how fanfiction.net has a spike where there was a big drop off but then it stabilized? That’s around the time that they cracked down on adult content.
(2) I expected to see Livejournal decline drastically sooner, but it actually continued to climb a bit after Strikethrough and related things, until Tumblr and AO3 both started getting very popular. Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively so far, I do think that people were starting to leave, but that there had to be critical mass elsewhere in order for that leaving to start going en masse. There were also a lot of people who continued using Livejournal while they picked up other platforms as well.
(3) As my PhD student collaborator Brianna said, we have “a beautiful arc of AO3 and Tumblr being besties forever.” (This makes sense to me based on some findings from my previous work about AO3, and how Tumblr filled in the gap of social interaction left by Livejournal.)

In the “other” category of fan platforms used, the most popular was Discord. This doesn’t surprise me! For the most part, participants had only been active in it for the past couple of years, which is why it didn’t show up specifically in the survey (which was constructed based on interview data we already had). We also saw less frequent mentions of Facebook, reddit, delicious/pinboard, and IRC.

Digging into the qualitative data will give this data much more explanatory power, but I think this is very interesting!

We also asked participants what their primary fandom was for each platform they used. Based on a pretty simple analysis (most popular words!), here are the top five fandoms from each platform:

Usenet: Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Star Wars, Sailor Moon

Email Lists: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Gundam Wing

Messageboards: Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon

Fandom-Specific Archives: Harry Potter, Buffy, Stargate, X-Files, Doctor Who

Fanfiction.net:  Harry Potter, Naruto, Buffy, Star Wars, Gundam Wing

Livejournal: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Stargate, Doctor Who, Merlin

DeviantArt: Harry Potter, Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Supernatural, Final Fantasy

Dreamwidth: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, Stargate, RPF

Archive of Our Own: Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf

Tumblr: Marvel, Star Wars, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Teen Wolf

Twitter: Star Wars, Supernatural, Marvel, RPF, Yuri on Ice

Note that this is NOT necessarily representative of the overall popularity of certain fandoms on these platforms. Our survey, because it was targeting research questions about fandom migration, asked for participants who had been in fandom for 10+ years. This means that our results skewed older (mean 31; median 30; SD 8.6). And of course, most of the participants are currently in fandom, which means that it also misses people who have left fandom.

It is interesting to see the change across platforms and over time though! My favorite tidbit is how Star Wars was popular, dropped off, and then came back with gusto.

This is only the tip of the iceberg on this data analysis! If there’s anything else that is easily shared as we do this analysis, I’ll continue to do so. Otherwise, wish us luck and I’ll eventually share a completed analysis if/when (fingers crossed!) we publish on this.

I have a list of emails from everyone who participated and wanted to give us that info to share the results. If you’d like to be added to that list, send me an email at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu. Or just feel free to follow me here, or myself and Brianna on Twitter.

Twice today tried to google something I’d googled before and couldn’t find it

First, this classic comic on 90s net furry culture which in row 3 column 2 invokes the old concept of “furry gay” (as distinct from gender dysphoria, r1c2)

The 90s had a richer concept of pansexuality as, ah, undiscrimination

ANYWAY, the second was that Richard Seymour attempt to schism the SWP with Laurie Penny (and China Mieville, thus their faction were the “Sino-Seymourists”)

look out for those memory holes!

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

just remembered that ‘90s SNL skit where some frat guys rub a lamp and get a genie and wish to like “see two lesbians getting it on until we bust a nut”

and they get two lumpy greyhairs interrupting tedious foreplay to ask if the other picked up bulgur for their solstice potluck

‘90s lesbian chic, do you remember that? That Tanya Chalkin “Kiss” poster, that’s gotta be one of the most ‘90s things in the world

When I moved into a house last year of college it had two different copies of that Kiss poster already on the walls

>@youzicha​ said: Although it was apparently shot in 2002? Maybe we need a concept of “the long 1990s”.

I see it. It doesn’t really match up with politics or culture

(nü metal/rap-rock vs. what? emo? indtwee? maybe that one Daft Punk set at Coachella that got everyone to turn over to electro house DJs

((so was Best Coast a nostalgia act then?))

30 Rock didn’t bring back the half-hour sitcom til ‘06)

maybe tie it to the web 1.5>2.0 transition?

kontextmaschine:

So here’s a site for you: the Closing Logos Wiki, a collection of production company logos from the end of shows. (This month is 2-D and 3-D Logos Month). Pretty comprehensive, still pretty compulsive in a kind of pre-2007 internet way.

Mostly seems to be the work of one guy. Fair enough, you read around, you read the descriptions of enough, and you notice each one has a “Scare Factor”, which - it’s not really clear what it’s for. Sometimes he seems to be using this for an esthetic critique - he’s not very fond of black/neon color combinations, which makes him not very fond of the late ‘80s-early ‘90s graphics. But sometimes he’s being strangely earnest about it, that the logo is scary or “terrifying”. And then you read enough of these entries, each with their own “Scare Factor” section, and you realize there’s not actually a line there, for him.

And you realize that not only is this site the product of a guy who felt compelled to compile every production company logo he could find, but one of the things he made a point of addressing for every single one is “whether this production company logo could possibly scare you”. And the answer is sometimes yes! (Another thing he addressed are “what are three or four nicknames I could coin for this logo?”)

Check out all the “Scare Factor: High” reviews. Check out the MGM one especially, where a lot of them are fine but one is terrifying because it involves a particularly scary lion, and also banner.

And now look at this “rules’ page. I mean as petty as any forum mod, though the enthusiasm for putting “BANNED” in red caps is something, but also of interest is the only rule with a listed exception:

17.) To the Writers and Up: Do not add personal comments to the articles. That includes personal scare factors, your own side notes, making the articles your own forum and telling people not to upload images or videos on the articles (that even includes locking pages where no one can edit or put up images or videos). The pages here are for logo descriptions, pictures and videos ONLY. If you want to share personal opinions, go to the Favorite Logos and Dreaded and Hated Logos pages, or use the discussion feature. If you disregard this rule, you will receive a warning. If you do it again, you will get another warning and a demotion, and if it continues, you will be BANNED!

• 17b.) If you must make a thread about a logo that scares you, do it on the page the logo is described on, and nowhere else. Any thread running afoul of this is at risk of deletion.

There’s a story here.

Honestly “everything in the world is eventually related back to mockery of a try-too-hard webcartoonist being earnest about a miscarriage” is a decent monument to Web 1.5