The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

that awl article and kaleb horton's thing are way more what i was talking about really...i'm not like a usenet luddite longing for the days of angelfire sites and shit (though that had its charms)

but in general all the cards seemed to be stacked against good writing, good thinking, good content....

there's great stuff on twitter and i think twitter is far better than facebook because it (supposedly) is a real FEED, not chosen for you from algorhithms. twitter can be toxic as fuck but it feels p authentic..that said it's not doing well financially AND there is a downside to twitter, in terms of i love the freeform convos that happen but it also by nature makes everyone be very "quippy" by nature and isn't great for extended thoughts obv (though that one guy's #howiquitspin thing is great right now)

One thing I do kind of wonder about *the future of the internet* is how much of it will still be text-based. One of my favorite things about ILX is that it's like 90% text in a clean, visually easy format. The internet has probably lead to me reading more total words per week than I ever did before, although they're in shorter bursts. Of course the whole internet-at-work thing limits how much video one can watch, so text still has its utility.

Bill Gates' "Content Is King", written in 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/20010126005200/http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1996essay/essay960103.asp

Pretty good characterisation of the Web now with a couple exceptions.

In the long run, advertising is promising. An advantage of interactive advertising is that an initial message needs only to attract attention rather than convey much information. A user can click on the ad to get additional information-and an advertiser can measure whether people are doing so.

god, if there's one thing i'm always searching for it's additional information about consumer products

http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2015/07/brief-book-reviews-internet-of-garbage.html

review of a book on the problem of online harassment that compares it to the problem of filtering/managing spam

http://textfiles.com/

Lots of old internet/pre-internet text files. Anarchist Cookbook, instructions for Blue Boxes, ASCII art, etc.

this one is gold

http://www.textfiles.com/apple/peeks.pokes.3.1

                                     SOUND
X=PEEK(-16336).TOGGLES the SPEAKER {1 click}
POKE -16336,0..TOGGLES the SPEAKER {1 click (longer then PEEK)}

brilliant site!

pertinent to the matter at hand:

http://textfiles.com/100/bbsdeath.pro

re: internet of garbage: i've developed a certain distrust of those who propose technological solutions for social problems, and i regard the "successful fight against spam" as almost as great a victory as the record industry's fight against commercial bootleg records.

  A user would not only answer his or HER mail, but also butt into other
people's conversations and throw in his/her two cents worth.

this file is brilliant the boy is a prophet

For me personally, the internet was at its most exciting between roughly 1996 and 2002, partly because it was a much simpler time. There used to be a wider variety of fansites - granted, some of them were lacking in content and seemed a bit thrown together for the sake of it, but at times you'd stumble across something where someone had made a real effort to build it up into a great information resource. I spent more time looking at fansites for specific bands/albums/movies etc. because I often found they were bigger and better in content than a lot of the official ones at that time. If I wanted to talk to people I knew, I had an instant messenger. If I wanted to talk about a specific band or whatever, I'd use a newsgroup or sign up for the message board. If I wanted to chew the fat with people I didn't know, I could either IRC or again, use a message board. Most of my time on the internet, though, was pretty much spent idly surfing and seeing what turned up. It also helped that in the pre-Google days, different search engines would yield different results, and Yahoo! even kept a directory for all fansites/official sites etc. It was easy to keep things separate, too: online was online, offline was offline, and the two didn't really meet unless you chose to make it so.

While there was a degree of trolling on the internet back in the '90s, I remember for the most part than anyone who was in a newsgroup or on a message board or on IRC was willing to talk and was there to communicate - and I remember, the occasional "character" aside, it being quite a pleasant experience. Nowadays, I can't help but feel that while there's more people online than ever, more people aren't as willing to communicate... but perversely, at the same time, they're willing to throw as much of themselves at their social media profiles as possible. Back in the '90s/early '00s, I distinctly remember everyone was (understandably, and obviously) much more guarded in that respect, but they were so much more talkative.

I have to admit, I'm not really into social media and prefer to use the internet in a far more old-skool way. While I do have a Facebook, I don't particularly enjoy using it and the majority of the time I tend to use it as an instant messenger, really. When I do browse my News Feed, it tends to be 90% of the time either full of crap that I'm either not interested in, or I just don't want to see. I only have so much patience for wading through pictures of people's dinner, "motivational" quotes, daft opinions, Jeremy Kyle Show-like nonsense, or people putting up cryptic statuses that allude to something catastrophic having happened and then when the gossipers come out out of the woodwork and go "OMG! U ok babes?" they're all like "yeh I'm fine lol". I don't have a Twitter and I definitely don't have an Instagram. I'm just not interested in using the internet to that level. I enjoy using Youtube, but definitely tend to avoid watching Vlogs or daft content, and I don't read blogs unless a search engine turns one up.

I enjoy ILX because, from the looks of it, it hasn't really changed and still has some of the old-skool internet spirit to it. I hope it never changes.

Also, Wikipedia has made searching for information so fucking boring.

aw man, i love wikipedia! it feels like a remnant from the golden age that's still relevant and useful and hasn't sold out

nah Wikipedia beneath the surface is a horrible nest of banally evil nerds playing status games with each other and doing the same old nerds-with-power shit. It's the thought-terminating cliche of the web.

If banally evil nerds decide that fact-checking and editing each other is fertile ground for playing status games, then who am I to object? I don't really care much what's under the surface, so long as the surface itself has some factual information on the subject I'm interested in, presented in an accessible format.

The argument is sometimes made that the result of those "games" is a verbal surface sanitized of opinions contrary to those of that particular nerdosphere. Plus that their criterion of "notoriety" privileges those things they think are notable while producing a loud silence on topics that they don't care about. As long as it retains its penumbra of relative objectivity, it will reinforce the hierarchies resident within the heads of those particular nerds.

Imagine a widely respected, frequently-cited source that had detailed plot summaries for every episode of HBO's "Rome," but only season-level plot arcs for "Charmed." Even if I agree with that editorial judgment (and I do), we should not pretend that there isn't power being wielded, groups of people being privileged, and voices being (however trivially) suppressed.

a verbal surface sanitized of opinions contrary to those of that particular nerdosphere

every encyclopedia has its own nerdosphere and includes some editorial power which suppresses perspectives down to that which it finds acceptable. it comes with the territory. I'm not sure that situation could be avoided without rendering the encyclopedia unusable by anyone.

xpost
i mean, yeah! it would be weird if there weren't power struggles contained within something that is open to editing by anyone and aims to provide information about virtually everything.

at the same time, it nearly always provides what you're looking for (assuming you understand what it is and use it with realistic expectations), there's no real substitute for it, and it's not sponsored by honda or rupert murdoch or john galt. so i for one am comfortable with my go wikipedia stance.

Aimless/Karl, I agree - I'm not saying there's an encyclopedia free of those concerns.

I'm arguing with the assertion that they aren't interesting concerns, or that those concerns don't matter as long as the content is useful and engaging.

To go further, imagine a widely respected, frequently-cited source having richly detailed biographical information about Nathan Bedford Forrest and almost nothing about Sojourner Truth. Reams on Alexander Pope and almost nothing about Aphra Behn. Reams on Cecil Rhodes and almost nothing about Ken Saro-Wiwa.* A rich trove of information on Jar-Jar Binks, accompanied by a loud silence on [insert something you like here].

And it's almost every ninth-grader's first stop before they start writing an essay.

These may all be defensible editorial choices, but they are choices, and it's not weird to be curious who's doing the choosing and how and why.

(* = hypothetical examples chosen off the top of my head - I am not claiming to have exhaustively read/critiqued those specific Wikipedia entries.)

FWIW I think Wikipedia almost always offers the perfect level of detail, neither too much nor too little.

I thought 2002-2006 or so was really exciting too, I loved how sites would crop up for every little niche and would kinda function like books instead of weekly-updated content farms. That was when you had a bunch of sites where people would write up reviews and grades for every single Genesis album, thought that was quite endearing. I don't know if anyone's doing that now.

i don't know if this was ever true, but i loved the era of feeling like if you just kept updating your blog (manually updated painstakingly with terrible HTML (some things never never change for me)) and somehow got the attention of the right person in an appropriate web ring, you could really make it

I think that spirit's def. still alive, with vine / youtube channel / instagram / tumblr instead of hand-coded blog.

"These may all be defensible editorial choices, but they are choices, and it's not weird to be curious who's doing the choosing and how and why."

Is wikipedia even edited in the usual sense? Does anyone co-ordinate contributions? Do editors try to keep down the length of certain articles irrespective of the quality of what's submitted?

the spirit of 20XX is alive in this absurdly deep fountain of alien material
https://alienseries.wordpress.com/

I think there was a slightly sad growing up experience for me as the internet expanded, like there was some point at which it still felt like you could tap into some special sensibility via awareness of a certain meme or video or blog, and by extension, because a blogger could be special merely for reviewing 70s jazz oddities, or for taking photos of x that look like y, or whatever, you felt like maybe you could be special too. Eventually the proliferation and multiplication of all this stuff, not to mention its institutionalization as "viral content" has a way of making you feel very unspecial, even that perhaps no human being is all that special, that we're predictable beings fitting patterns and falling into categories.

D:

http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/mill/crisis.html

I now began to find meaning in the things, which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of music I had often experienced; but, like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time first became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good by showing me a source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa [Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels], who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure; content, as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.

man alive, it's not that "no human being is all that special".

i think there may be two things going on. either very few humans are special and it is difficult to find them, hence we start to believe no one is special; or we are special but it is difficult for us to figure out what makes us unique from the rest, and worst of all, we are taught to suppress our uniqueness because we are led to believe that we must conform to society's rules. so we feel ashamed at whatever makes us feel different from the rest. homogeneity is the name of the game.

so we see a popular blog and think, oh nice, i like to do that, as well. and johnny boy goes and sets up a blogspot on the very same subject because he sees other people really love it. but no one knows about johnny's interest in ancient or mediaeval concrete poetry.

xp, that is great!

I agree that 2002-2006 was the best time. I loved Diaryland and the Flock browser.

either very few humans are special and it is difficult to find them, hence we start to believe no one is special; or we are special but it is difficult for us to figure out what makes us unique from the rest

I'd say very few human beings are special in the sense that they clearly have gifts that are rarely matched when compared to all the other 7,500,000,000 human beings out there.

However, that global framework is highly artificial and not very reflective of our actual reality, which plays out in a much smaller setting, within which we may be seen as genuinely special. Our importance is better measured by those whom we meet, speak with and affect in our daily lives. Take us away and there is a hole in the fabric of our personal community which cannot be quickly or easily filled.

If you think you need to be a world famous genius to be special, I'd suggest you are belittling yourself needlessly.

Maybe the most special people are those who don't think they are so special. The world is full of special individualists who are really just selfish and insecure jerks.

see, i just don't believe in drawing a line between some notional past and the present, between me as a child twenty years ago and the children of today. because knowingly or not (in my case certainly not), the trolls of twenty years ago like me set the stage for the really obnoxious trollfaces of today.

i also don't believe in an inevitable narrative of decline, although for security reasons i suspect the internet has gone past the event horizon. things get worse, things get better, things get worse again. online discourse is generally pretty bad right now, but stuff we can't predict right now will come along and disrupt the current paradigms. always does.

trying to work through "death of the internet" issues lately.

still believe the internet is doomed due to security issues, but i don't think that makes the underlying social issues merely a sideshow, think their causes and solutions are worth understanding because it may come up again.

random google search for a guy who didn't know what kind of business he was running led me to the wikipedia page for "low context culture". it's a sociological term from the '70s, but i think it has relevance when talking about the net.

due to simple volume, net communication has become necessarily high context. writing a lot of stuff is seen as egotistical, because ain't nobody got time to read all that. concision in writing is preferred.

the problem with high context cultures is that they rely on high levels of social cohesion. and it's hard to apply that to a medium that's already crippled due to its lack of ability to convey inflection and non-verbal tics. given these problems, it's no wonder that the net has become so divided into cliques.

for me this is pretty awful, because i share a high level of cultural context with perhaps a dozen people. the remainder of the world has no idea what i am talking about the vast majority of the time, and i have no opportunity to explain. it gets frustrating.

and this, for me, was the big difference between the internet of 20 years ago and the internet of now: 20 years ago the whole object was expanding cultural context, which seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

I'd say very few human beings are special in the sense that they clearly have gifts that are rarely matched when compared to all the other 7,500,000,000 human beings out there.

However, that global framework is highly artificial and not very reflective of our actual reality, which plays out in a much smaller setting, within which we may be seen as genuinely special. Our importance is better measured by those whom we meet, speak with and affect in our daily lives. Take us away and there is a hole in the fabric of our personal community which cannot be quickly or easily filled.

If you think you need to be a world famous genius to be special, I'd suggest you are belittling yourself needlessly.

― Aimless, Tuesday, July 21, 2015 5:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure, I think there's just something about spending too much time seeking entertainment via the internet that is conducive to feeling lost among the 7.5 billion. All the more reason why, if I were playing in a band today, for example, I'd be much more interested in building up a local following and being part of a supportive scene then in trying to blow up on youtube.

hm, that's interesting, rushomancy

The separation of worlds is also the case within ilx itself

wikipedia's music entries are another great way to tell the demographics of the editorship and who believes what is important

also, i mean
http://www.livescience.com/48985-wikipedia-editing-gender-gap.html

"A 2011 editor survey by the Wikimedia Foundation pegged the number of active female editors at only 9 percent. Other surveys have found slightly different percentages, but none exceed about 15 percent female representation worldwide."

not to mention that the whole 'neutral point of view' hardline stance is sort of weakened by the intrinsic biases of editors and what they see as 'neutral' - kind of like how in american journalism the 'objective' stance is the one that's pro-capitalism and pro-'official statement,' etc

Good point, maura.

I went to journalism school twenty-mumble years ago, and even then no one really believed that objectivity was possible or even, necessarily, desirable. The goal of objectivity was often replaced with a vague "trying to be fair."

That fake, stilted kind of neutrality can lead to what we used to call the "On the other hand, Mr. Hitler contends..." effect. Also to creation science in Texan textbooks, but that's another topic.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

Finally reading this, really great stuff.

I would start the golden age of the internet with the late 60s and end it with the iPhone. Reading about early computer history you keep running across the question "But what do they DO?" as if this new technology was being created because it was possible, because some visionaries and psychedelic engineers envisioned a vague path to the holodeck. Rather than tools being created for a specific purpose, the personal computer was created and the purpose was to be worked out later. Possibly the purpose was completely up to you. External brain enhancer?

I wonder if you traveled back in time to XEROX PARC and told them in the future everyone will have their own personal computer on them at all times and it will have have a single button you would have blown some minds.

it would be fun to travel back in time and speak only in a language that you make up on the spot

if you went back in time and told me neil hamburger would star in a commercially successful adaptation of ant man, i'd be like waaaaaaat?

the computer stuff might be less mind-blowing to 50s, 60s nerds who had already cobbled together working demos at that point. conceptually we're not really that far advanced from that doug engelbart demo.

instead tell them the rolling stones are still on tour.

wikipedia is horrible if you are using it to try and find information on a topic you are already quite knowledgeable about ("these claims Wikipedia is making about Walli Elmlark are spurious in the extreme") or if, god help you, you wish to contribute to the knowledge pool, at which point you quickly become enmeshed in all sorts of grotesque nerd power games. on the other hand, if you want to learn more about something you know nothing about, it is fucking AMAZING.

since people keep arguing about wikipedia, i thought i would test my assumptions. i decided to look at a sample article, on an issue that has political resonance today: slavery in the united states (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States). this is an interesting topic because it's one on which the popular consensus belies the historical debate. because historians, like the public, believe "slavery was bad", but their professional duties mean they can't stop there.

i'm going to focus in particular on the "treatment" section. this is actually pretty fascinating. the first thing you see is the famous photo of a badly whipped slave from the 1860s. frankly, after that picture everything else in the section might as well just read "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet". nevertheless there are certain apologists clearly fighting the good fight here, as the caption indicates that "the guilty overseer was fired", implying that there was justice under slavery, ignoring the fact that the very existence of that picture is a direct and visceral denial of that claim.

as far as the text, the first sentence of the section is a mealy-mouthed non-statement that treatment of slaves "varied widely". the overview paragraph ends with the unsourced statement "It was part of a paternalistic approach in the antebellum era." i fully expect this sentence to be shortly deleted, because it's clearly added by an editor arguing with the previous (sourced) sentence which claims that "some slaveholders improved the conditions of their slaves after 1820". i wouldn't be surprised if this section looked entirely different tomorrow (for reference, the text i'm referencing is as of noon gmt on 2015-07-23). this is unusual, to say the least, for an institution which was abolished 150 years ago.

there are nine paragraphs in the section, with the first section being the overview i mentioned, and the other eight addressing various aspects of treatment of slaves at random with no coherence whatsoever.

of these nine, paragraphs 5, 7, and 9 contain open apologism for slavery. these apologies all follow the same pattern, in that they lead by naming a respected historical source, and continue on to cherry-pick a statement out of the context of a longer and more comprehensive work of theirs to make it look as though slavery was "not that bad". these paragraphs are all very short, two sentences at most.

paragraphs 6 and 8 are thorough and damning indictments of the practice of slavery. paragraph 6 begins "Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment." these paragraphs are the longest and most compelling in the section. paragraph 8 deals with sexual abuse of slaves. the tone is npov, but the content is heart-wrenching and sickening. this paragraph is wikipedia at its best.

paragraphs 2 and 4 deal with how american slaves were forbidden to read and prohibited from associating in groups, except for churches. though brief, each paragraph contains mitigating codicils.

paragraph 3 deals with medical treatment of slaves, and is flatly bizarre. unlike all the other paragraphs, it contains no reference whatsoever to their owners. given that this was the defining feature of slavery, it seems wholly inappropriate. perhaps in one version of the article it may have held relevance, but it has no place in its current position in the article it stands today.

there is also a link in this article to a lengthier article entirely devoted to "Treatment of Slaves in the United States", which i am sure is also fascinating and worthy of deeper analysis, but i don't have time to address it right now, except to say that wikipedia's ability to self-contradict is one of it's fascinating eccentricities. one of the things i kind of love about wikipedia is that it actively punishes the tl;dr impulse by feeding you skewed misinformation on the summary page. frequently summary sections of longer separate articles will contain information not in the longer article; more frequently these summaries will deliberately distort the content of the longer article.

in conclusion, this section is terrible. utterly, utterly, terrible. you could get more accurate information on slavery from a texan history book than you can from wikipedia. i love wikipedia dearly, i believe in their mission, i have learned and continue to learn countless incredible things from it. however, looking at this article, i am forced to conclude that it represents a serious failure of the wikipedia content creation and editing process. if the wikimedia foundation hopes to contribute to a more knowledgable world, as opposed to simply stuffing us all with trivia, it has a great deal of work to do.

Regardless of what you think of Wikipedia's current state, it doesn't result from the various ills discussed upthread - SEO gaming, content mills, popup ads, likes, click-throughs, or corporate malfeasance.

On the surface, Wikipedia's ethos is pretty much the ethos of the "web that was" championed by the pastopians. Volunteer-driven, democratic, a labor of obsessive love, crowdsourced, and (theoretically) open to quirky monomaniacs and people with huge amounts of knowledge about obscure topics.

And yet. For all its virtues as an information source, it is a niche phenomenon. A domain of nerdy white dudes with lots of spare time, good internet connections, and the technical savvy to use them toward their own ends. So, again, rather like the internet in the alleged Golden Age.

yo did someone take wrong turn on the way to debate society or something

And yet. For all its virtues as an information source, it is a niche phenomenon. A domain of nerdy white dudes with lots of spare time, good internet connections, and the technical savvy to use them toward their own ends. So, again, rather like the internet in the alleged Golden Age.

― Ye Mad Puffin, Thursday, July 23, 2015 11:03 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like you've purposefully read past my post several times in this thread that i'm not necessarily talking about going back to usenet i'm more disturbed by what's happened in the last five or six years

puffin's post is too high-context for me. i don't know what they're talking about. are they replying to my post? or talking about wikipedia in general? is j making fun of my post or puffin's? i feel like there's a lot of people talking past each other in this thread.

i guess i should lay my cards on the table. my problems are more with Internet Classic(R), with the failure of the social and technological models the net was founded on, than with the evils of New Internet, which seeks to ameliorate those failures by reducing the internet to a greeting card factory. i've never had a great deal of interest in or fruitful interaction with New Internet. i'm an advocate of privacy and freedom of speech who has seen those principles catastrophically fail to scale, with the biggest threats to those values not infrequently coming from their fiercest proponents.

so i find myself advocating New Internet in the hopes that it might somehow figure out how to do something useful. worst comes to worst at least i don't have to worry about being doxed by people whose only interest in the internet is to post betty boop memes. it's an odd position to be in.

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/2/27645/871913-betty_boop.gif