There were two recurring themes some editor at Salon – around say ‘96 when it and Slate kind of were for-internet print media – was fixated on.
One was a child-liberationist one, like “parents can have people abduct their 'problem children’ to offshore reform camps like Tranquility Bay, and also often backwater areas of various states use 'Person In Need of Supervision’ structures to apply the state to control teens on parents’ behalf AND THAT’S FUCKED UP”
The other was “oh yeah remember how there was once a rich subculture of female Star Trek fans writing 'slash’ fanfiction?”
And it was honestly surprising to me it was the second one the culture ended up picking up as a major subplot.
The only reason I haven’t put together a “favourite pre-2000 Internet meme” poll to complement all those “favourite 2000s Internet meme” ones is that nobody actually remembers when the 1990s ended and I know for a fact that the notes would just be a solid wall of people going “dude, you forgot X” and me replying “bro, X is from 2005”.
If you DO eventually do one, the dancing baby better be on there! That’s the first big internet “thing” I remember as a middle schooler back in the day. I remember having it on my computer and hearing about it on the news, and then it was on ally mcbeal. first “meme” I knew of in my internet life
An incomplete list of Internet memes that are actually from the 1990s:
All Your Base*
Colin Mochrie
Dancing Baby
Evil Bert
Hampster Dance
Mr. T Ate My Balls
Stick Death
* the phrase itself, but not the the viral text-to-speech video; the latter first appeared in June of 2000
An incomplete list of Internet memes which are popularly cited as 1990s memes which actually debuted in 2000 or later:
Annoying Thing/Crazy Frog (the sound clip of a guy making motor noises with his mouth is borrowed from an earlier meme, but the creature itself was created in 2003)
Chuck Norris Facts (popularised in 2005)
Hatten är din (the song is from 1981; the Swedish flash video that made it a meme is from 2000)
Homestar Runner (though the eponymous character existed as early as 1996, the webtoon series that spawned the associated memes just barely misses the cut, debuting in January of 2000)
O RLY? (though it’s uncertain precisely when the originating image macro was created, the owl photo it’s based on is not known to have been present online before 2001)
Real Ultimate Power (the website went live in 2002)
Tunak Tunak Tun (the song was published in 1998, but it didn’t achieve viral meme status until 2006)
YTMND (Finding Forrester did not exist in the 1990s)
man, i’m worried about the kids these days. i think they aren’t being raised with the proper values. i think they aren’t being acculturated right. they’re being denied their heritage. their cultural inheritance. like do they even know what goatse is
The internet is amazing for sociological research in that it is the ultimate double-edged sword. All self-writings are performative to some degree, in fact things like historical ‘journals’ were often literary fads or writing projects that would envision public release. But still, in comparison the internet is an absolute explosion of written, documented text (& images and film!) about what people care about, spend their time on, etc, but all of it has been ruthlessly pruned by optimization metrics to be content to be consumed by others. Its all half real, half brand.
I will often, to study how people view a media property, watch all the different youtube videos or read the reddit posts on it, but (particularly with the youtube) you can’t actually take naively that the opinion being stated is the creator’s opinion; instead its the narrative they would be interesting to make as a video. They probably believe that narrative after making the video, that work changes you, but that chronology matters, and you can only view that process from the edges of those polished works.
So someone linked an upload of some really early anime websites that got loaded on CDs… from amagazine? That would include as a bonus to subscribers?? Archived versions of fansites on the CDs??? Which is just, amazing on so many levels, but is a real bonus for us. One of the linked early fan sites is Fredart.com, Megatokyo author Fred Gallagher’s pre-webcomic site on anime news and his personal art. (Really having a lot of Megatokyo Baader-Meinhoff these days)
First off it’s adorable, the art in particular is great and it has all of these details on like forum website drama at the time, precious info. Check it out if you want.
What draws my eye most is something it shares with its contemporary peers, the utter *lack* of optimization its text has gone through to engage its audience. Everything is just filled with asides, personal details, life stories; now you know this fan-art outfit was inspired by shopping with Fred’s then-girlfriend Sarah at the mall, on Saturday, at Hudsons!
Or how Sarah’s Origami page tells us she picked it up as a seduction technique to get into weeb-master Fred’s good graces on its literal intro, which is the cutest and she should be immensely proud of this even 24 years later, I hope she is:
No one (on average ofc ofc exceptions exist) does this posting fan art these days, you add like a quippy one-liner or a tag & title, because people want the art, you have optimized the content for that. Its not like Fred & others weren’t trying to make their website entertaining, though; they just didn’t get feedback on how, there were no engagements and very few metrics. “Talking normal about themselves” was as good a way as any. So you get very high levels of just authentic, actual real-life information. I know more about Fred in 1998, how he actually lived, from this website than I do from 99% of the people I follow on Tumblr (or worse, Twitter).
Though I think there is an added factor to this one - in 1998 on the internet you would expect people to care about this more. The reason fan artist #8367 phrases every non-art tweet as a joke or politics rant is because they know you won’t care otherwise, you have ten thousand fan artists to choose from so you gotta make it interesting (note, if you are thinking of counterexamples: are they hot?). You only matter for your content; existing is useless. But on the early internet, running a website? You were important *by default*. You got points just for showing up. Numbers were low, content was sparse, finding peers was take-what-you-can get. As such, you did care about the person, inherently, as they were there, and that makes them worth caring about. Its like default celebrity status. Visiting these websites - personally made by small groups - was like a digital housecall. People very quickly became no-qualifiers-needed-friends in that environment.
Now that you pick and choose from a list of hundreds of thousands, we have all been trained to look for different things. Which means we write different things to match. How we communicate has been transformed by our digital architecture (Other factors at play of course, generational conditioning, social media site design, etc; one at a time…)
Oh and here is Ruri in a Summer Dress, in case you were curious; the jacket is great, love the curved hem and the piping.
Huh, that really is very different from the modern web. My first impression was “teenager” (when we also tend to experiment with different forms of social presentation and see what works), but Gallagher was 30 when he wrote it.
disgusting that middle school girls googling ‘real powerful magic spells’ will now get glamour and teen vogue articles full of sponsored links to amazon crystals as the top results instead of a homemade website with deadly serious instructions for how to turn yourself into a vampire
Ever since I was a child, I instinctively railed against the idea that childhood innocence was a meaningful or respectable concept or that there were certain things children shouldn't know or see, and I can confirm it never stopped me from pursuing the most fucked up, socially unacceptable material I could find.
By the time I was 12 years old, I had already seen extensive amounts of hardcore porn of all types including scat and bestiality, and I would frequently get banned from message boards for posting images of such things just for shits and giggles. I am happy to report that neither my attitudes towards childhood purity nor my sense of humor have changed, nor have I ended up in dire straits because of the things I experienced, and I am fully in support of other kids getting the opportunity to see as much fucked up shit as I did because it made my life more entertaining.
Genuinely blows my mind that minors on the internet ask people with nsfw blogs not to interact, because to me that would have defeated the entire purpose of unrestricted internet access and the very first thing I would have wanted on social media would be to get the chance to see all the good stuff.
Worries me that so many adults have convinced kids to self-shelter and broken the rebellious fighting spirit that characterized the early days of the internet. Or maybe it's just that it's too mainstream and there are too many normies online now. Sometimes I think the internet should be made less normie friendly in terms of the ease of access and use, so it can remain a space for people with some level of self-selection for curiosity and competance.
