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the web is in a weird spot. some of us who rebelled against web 2.0 are sitting here, our lives consumed by it, wishing we could go back but addicted to the now.
nostalgic sites like this one, neopets classic, and 1997.chat are popping up, and thriving or dying.
services we lived on, like aim, myspace, neopets, livejournal, geocities, angelfire, yahoo groups, etc, have changed or gone defunct.
so we're here. now. in 2021.
when i was on myspace, i wrote poetry, i posted songs. i had a band page that was me singing. i did surveys. heck, i even enjoyed chain letters and shared a few when i still believed in fairies and demons and ghosts and whatever else could come get you in the night. i learned html. i hissed at css because it looked scary, but i like it now.
do we go back to how things were? do we roleplay (oh how i miss roleplay) the people we used to be?
do we use these sites with modern habits and intentions?
do we double space after periods???
i think the assumed answer would be to integrate who we are now with what fun things we lost when these sites went away, but who will look at us now? people who judge with modern eyes. people who didn't survive 2006, who don't know about the chan wars or ED or rotten dot com or somethingawful. people who are, in a way, softer, but also more uniform.
the days of these sites were days of experimentation. the internet was newly open to the youth, all youth rather than those of us who were drawn to BBSes and newsgroups and who were screamed at every day by the robot we had to torture to connect. "glow" was a functional html tag that didn't require any CSS at all. dollz were plentiful and easy to make.
i guess my point is, the world has changed, and the parts that died may yet be dead. perhaps no necromancy can be used for them. perhaps we'll try anyway. seeing people spend the last decade+ call our younger years cringe has lead to very torn feelings on this. i actually liked who i was, but we've bullied our past selves to make our present selves feel successful, and what does that create? what has it created?
i dunno. i'm working to express myself. life's been hard, it's been a hard decade and a half. trauma and angst and pain and confusion have piled up and it almost feels like it was a simpler time when every third kid was cutting themself and every second kid was saying they did.
man, those years were such hell, but at least we all lived them. now what connection do we have, to each other, to ourselves?
i didn't have many friends then, but i felt comfortable with the ones i did have. can the same be said now?
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Wow.
Even if I wasn't tired on here at 3am, I would still be left somewhat speechless.
Those times that we were able to experience have come and gone like the whispers in the wind, but we will never forget them. Even without the political and geopolitical times that have been had -- so many stonehenged bookmarks have dented our souls in the 2000-2010 era. Almost seamlessly, everything that happened was important with a great purpose. We always had something new and shiny to keep us distracted in the then near future that we never had a chance to truly relish what we had in the present moment.
Look at other decades. How much has truly changed in a 10-20 year time frame that has had more impact on a technological scale? Technology evolved so quickly that we became attached to it as we didn't realize the attachment to others has been diminished and lost. The human factor is diminishing in life. What is genuine and purposeful? That is why we are still attached to our "good ol days." Many of us knew what life was like before the internet graced us with its presence inside our homes. Now, we can't live without it. Significant gains, yes. But what did it cost us?
The world is moving so quickly, faster than we can even keep up. I'm reminded of a thought I often have when I have my cats in the car; this machine is going faster than their bodies and minds evolved to cope with. They look out the window in wonder as more of the world than they were ever meant to see flashes past. And then, are they really so different from us? We can't run from city to city in a matter of hours ourselves. Even though we build this technology for ourselves, we aren't built for it ourselves. And sometimes that disconnect between the speed we're going and the speed we're built for clashes and we lose control and crash. I think that isn't just a car thing. Our culture is doing the same thing, pushed ever faster by the shared developments of a global consciousness, growing and building and changing faster than any one person can keep up.
Maybe that's why so many people have been drawn to history, and more recently. Maybe we're grasping for the world we had barely adjusted to before it disappeared. And I am all for recreating a place that brings that comfort, because nothing else in this speeding-towards-us future seems to.
by z; ; Report