Nothing New on the web then
WBS - Social Networking in 1996
I was looking over Rory Cellan Jones‘ look back over his blogging year on the BBC. Looking at the sort of subjects he has covered, to be honest, this is no different from any other year since the Internet became popular – just involved more people and different companies. So, lets go back not one year, but more than ten…..
I remember chatting on WBS in the mid 1990s. 1.5 million members, we used to chat, create our own websites, blog, share images and so on. Many also had Geocities sites (that shut this year) where they ran everything from personal blogs to fan sites. Some search engines, controversially, started talking about including these pages in their searches…. (guess which one did?)
We were using ICQ like crazy for instant messaging and those who had early DSL (not in the UK!) were using voice chat. People liked the multi-window of ICQ allowing for multiple chats and conferencing.
MUDS were the online games (though limited appeal).
File sharing was common (via ICQ and other ways) and was criticised by many. Copyright issue was a common argument with many arguing that the internet was a different world and normal law should not apply … to anything! Some of those same voices were also shoving malware into the files to take advantage of low OS security.
There was a myth that Porn was paying for the internet and was therefore a necessary evil.
There was a growing worry about child pornography, but the ISPs became angry at the idea that they should check their users personal web pages, even those held on the ISP servers, or block the usenet groups used by paedophiles – they said it was not their job to police the internet …. familiar argument?
We were rapidly learning about privacy back then and the realisation that if you put it up on the web, someone else may find it.
Infoseek was one of the main search engines of choice, Google was still stuck at Stanford.
Web pages used Gif animation and Java Applets rather than Flash, and audio was often in the form of midi files as audio files were a bit big!
But what people were doing and talking about back in 1995 on the web was exactly the same as now, just with a few less bells and whistles. The web may be in far more homes now than back then, but it is culturally identical and the issues exactly the same.
It has been an arrogance of the industry that they have changed the way humans communicate and have somehow created a brave new world.
They haven’t – human beings still communicate in exactly the same way as they have for millennia, using sound and sight. If anything, the internet is only just catching up with the idea that what it offers is a very incomplete version of communication compared to how human beings communicate when physically facing each other.
And the conversation has not changed either. People still like talking rubbish over the fence with their neighbours, so much so that the biggest money making opportunity is being regarded as trying to emulate that real life situation as closely as possible – that is what Facebook is, just a simulation of a idea that is thousands of years old.
I am reminded of the lyric “Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss,” from the Who song “Won’t be fooled again.”
Except we are – time and again.
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