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.
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.
Googled “how to pull out your own tooth” and all the top responses are like “here’s why you shouldn’t pull out your own tooth” and that’s simply not what I asked
this is because of all these dental offices hiring people to write SEO articles that bump to the top of google, in 2003 I could have googled this and gotten to a neon blue geocities called Jim’s Teeth DYI written in comic sans by one guy on his lunch break and when I went to go click on the blog post “best pliers for getting those suckers out” my mouse would have left sparkles in its wake
Back in the blog era I had ideas/memes (in the Dawkins sense) I originated in comment sections show up in the New York Times Opinion section twice, which I think actually left me with a pretty accurate sense of my potential
As someone who lived through the ‘90s it’s striking how eBay never comes up in discussions of the internet, maybe a reference when talking about PayPal or Amazon or Alibaba
I just bought something through eBay yesterday! they keep desperately offering me vouchers to come back
There is some “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” stuff in how the internet’s first e-commerce bazaar was built to sell distinct singular ones of things
I understand that most folks who are romanticising forum culture circa 2000 are too young to have actually participated in it, but people really do underestimate the unbelievable quantities of bullshit that were involved. Like, picture all of the worst things you’ve ever heard about small-town politics all rolled together, except the mayor kins Noodle from Gorillaz and instead of feuding with the town across the river your sworn enemy is the collective membership of an otherwise-unrelated Star Trek forum whose assistant moderator stands accused of plagiarising somebody’s Yuffie/Sephiroth smutfic. Interacting with members of the enemy forum is grounds for public ostracism. You know several people who actively maintain false identities there for the explicit purpose of spying and cross-posting drama. Multiple federal crimes have been committed in service to this dispute. It’s not even good smut. The person who owns the server on which the forum is hosted is fifteen years old.
“But at least the drama wasn’t political” man, what the fuck are you talking about? This was the era where popular memes would goof on Adolf Hitler like he was everybody’s wacky uncle, and just being a woman online meant tolerating a constant background radiation of transphobic horseshit – even if you were cis! – because it was implicitly assumed that every single person with she/her pronouns and Internet access was “a man pretending to be a woman”. There’s a very specific definition of “political” that’s being invoked when folks wax nostalgic about the lack of politics in online culture in the year 2000, is what I mean to say.
My experience was different from this in parts, but there are parts of description that make me think, ah, that brings back memories…
