~*~ 2024 ✝ 10 ✝ 19 ~*~
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the internet used to make isolation manageable - it used to turn the hikki neet bedroom cave into a wide-open window opening out to a highly-trafficked, yet somehow navigable interconnected network of all different media-things. chatting with people, playing games together, watching movies & discovering eachothers' genuine interests. even if they weren't the same, there was still a palpable sense that each user was using the network to build a reflection of their own media-interests, which in turn add up to a collective score of their awarensses, values & beliefs. whilst it's true in a general sense that "one's interests do not define one's personality", i believe there are at the very least measurable traceback paths by which you can identify the means by which people have found media that may have been 'formative' or particularly stimulating to them during some kind of internet-adjacent phase in their lives. i first watched serial experiments lain because of a picture stickied a tthe top of 4chan's /a/ - texhnolyze & haruhi & lucky star were on there. if i were to do the same thing now i'd cal myself a "normie". but regardless, the small collection of anime i downloaded them represents my first foray into putting an effort into develop these kind of interests, not unlike walking into an unfamiliar library for the first time & instinctually navigating what's available according to genre, reccomendation, cover art, book smell, etc.
as i look back, what strikes me about this most is that now, i seem to classify such phenomena - sensational pasttimes & bygones which i previously would have expectantly called normal - under increasingly niche & compartmentalized terminology. it seems to reveal to me that these memories that i have & this idealism that i have carried with me from those times is now something that is finally truly fading off back into the obscurity from whence it came. it always seemed to be doing so, & most anybody worth their salt in a chatroom or on a forum will tell you that this kind of thinking of the network or discussion-centre as a constantly decaying thing is nothing new, & is only the natural state of a computer network where "you get out what you put in", but now i can really see the big shift. the inexperienced young people who i would previously have to smooth over gaps in their knowledge - they now require me to lay the entire foundation of how the internet worked. the people who i had some similar understanding with, who also "surfed the web" & opened their computer screen towards the vast unknown - they are all marooned like myself, stuck off on a distant splinter of the network in a new kind of decentralized phone-internet isolation. perhaps it was simply the nature of the hardware itself - computers were big, sit-down grand pianos. there were no wireless hookups for quite a while. now that everything is handled on a cellular communications device, you can achieve that instant-escapism anywhere you like, & you can talk on the very same networks that regular computers do. even so, i don't really think it's the nature of the device shaping the structures present within the network - it's most certainly the eternally omnipresent forces of marketing & normative culture at large that shapes these things, much as it was during the times i am so particulary nostalgic about. i think the main reason i was so excited about the internet, as much as it pains me to type such a thing in the past tense, is because to me it represented a great potential to normalize a level of communication that was much more involved & interpersonal than simply being raised by the norms of the suburb you grew up in. i saw it as a unifying tool, a weapon of war to be co-opted by the resistance & utilized as a means of shaping the future towards a more savvy & communicative society. about that, i was totally wrong, & even if you had asked me back then, i would've probably given you a vision of the future that was much the same - i would have just told you that somehow or another, "normal" people were going to ruin it for everybody else - & they have.
when i was a child, before i used the internet, when i was about three or four years old, i was already voraciously literate, & would toddle down to the local library a block or two away with a red wagon that i'd drag with a rope to go & get books, CDs of both audio & CD-ROM & VHS tapes. this was probably the first independent thing i learned how to do, & i did it because my parents were too tired & stupid to want to go to the library so often. sometimes i would go twice in one day, & return books i'd finished on that same day. i didn't really have any concept of how measured time worked, but i knew that if the sun was going down, it was already getting far too late. at this same library, i used the internet for the very first time. i remember trying twice to get it to work. the first time was on netscape navigator, & it didn't work. i asked a librarian to solve the error message the browser threw at me, but she was of no use. the second time, they'd updated the computers to machines with internet explorer. i finally visited the site i'd been aggressively marketed by the TV so much - https://www.amandaplease.com/ - the amanda bynes show pretend-fansite from when she was still a tweenage child-star, before she started getting DUIs & posting about it on twitter & such. i'm not sure what i remember of the site, other than it looking very typical for a site of its time, complete with gifs & such of the things from the show. i'm sure it was probably full of weird feet stuff, maybe it had something to do with dan schneider. i don't know. what i do remember is that i had to run a bunch of ActiveX scripts to get the page to load, & that the computer blasted the theme song to the show at max volume whilst a bunch of crazy gifs & stuff lit up the screen. this was very amusing to me, because it upset & distrned a bunch of people in the library. a librarian quickly came to the computer, & i thought she was going to kick me off, but she just turned the volume down in windows instead. i continued browsing the site a bit - i think there was a game with the dancing lobsters that didn't work, & there was also a page called "words that rhyme with amanda". anyway, i'm sure this can all be documented by somebody who has dedicated themselves to the craft of resurrecting weird old nickelodeon child star mind control victim websites. the main thing i am trying to say here is that this was a formative experience for me. where most other people would talk about their nostalgia for web 1.0 or old online or whatever as something very grassroots & indie, i can definitely say that from quite literally my first day using the internet, i believed the best thing a website could do was collate a bunch of funny jokes & collate them all on a loosely stitched site decorated with obnoxious backgrounds, sparkly gifs & overtly loud & distracting autoplay music. even though it was not until much later that i actually worked out the machinations of what had to be done to become a "web master" & host my own stuff, i think it was at that time that i figured that it was so easy & stupid that just about anybody could do a good job of it.
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