The consequences of technological change for long-time Internet users are clearest in the transition from desktop terminals to mobile devices. In the mid-1990s, a majority of online social activity unfolded in text-only environments. Even as faster modems, graphical operating systems, and the Web grew more common, the Net of the 1990s was composed of seemingly endless streams of text; row upon row of letters, numbers, and punctuation. In the decades since, text-only applications such as IRC were displaced by interactive video displays that interleave images and text, respond to taps, gestures, swipes, and voices rather than instructions typed out on a keyboard. Although these new interfaces contributed to the growing accessibility of the internet, the transition was not without costs for users accustomed to navigating by text. For several participants in Markham’s Life Online fieldwork, the text-only interfaces of the 1990s afforded ways of being not available elsewhere in their lives. In the words of one interlocutor, text-only environments like MUDs and MOOs gave rise to “a much more complex life of relationships … centered around being a part of a meaningful community” (p. 176). For some long-time users, the Internet was a way of being because the Internet was made of text.
Text-oriented interfaces also shaped the embodied experiences of users in the 1990s. Markham’s interlocutors reported sitting at desks, day and night, in computer labs, offices, and bedrooms. Their hands played across a keyboard or moved a mouse, and their gazes focused on a screen fixed in place. Likewise, the textual environments they inhabited—MOOs, chatrooms, listservs, and newsgroups—maintained a material distinction between being online and offline. To enter one of these spaces required being in a particular place, sitting in front of a machine, and entering the proper sequence of commands to open a network connection. Although the predominance of text seemed to offer an “escape” from the body for some users, Markham found that the bodies of her interviewees stubbornly resisted abandonment, a phenomenon that Megan Boler later described as a “new digital Cartesianism” (2007). Embodiment persists, reflected Markham, even when bodies were rendered, enacted, and performed through text alone (1998, p. 209).
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For those users who inhabited the Internet as a way of being in 1997, the Internet was, implicitly, a society of written texts. Though text-only interfaces and text-oriented applications may not have obliterated the flesh, they nevertheless privileged written communication over all other forms of social interaction. As mobile broadband and constant connectivity blurred the boundary between online and offline in the late 2000s, however, written communication lost its status as the principal form of computer-mediated communication. For some of the people profiled in Life Online, this transition must have been profoundly unsettling. Consider Sherie, Markham’s obtuse interlocutor who insisted that life online is “very textual. very discursive and rhetorical. also poetic” (1998, p. 207). Could a user like Sherie, so committed to text, experience the always-on, broadband internet of 2017 as a way of being?
The growing, changing internet of the 2000s gave rise to new forms of creative expression and provided space for a much broader range of voices, but it also foreclosed the dreams of some long-time users whose way of being depended on the primacy of text. For these users, a text-only environment seemed to offer a form communication free from the prejudices they experienced in embodied environments. Text-mode interaction granted these users a special kind of control, evidenced in their recurring references to the “delete” key, a synecdoche for the entire apparatus of the text-only internet. The most optimistic among them imagined that the spread of internet access—that is, text-mode internet access—would bring about a radical egalitarian society, a “civilization of the Mind” in the words of EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow (1996). But it turned out that the diffusion of access was not enough. As the internet became another medium for entertainment and office work, the paradigm shifting dream of the late 1990s began to sound naïve and out of touch. What could be so revolutionary about baby pictures, cute dogs, celebrity news, and TV dramas? For the cyber-romantic of the 1990s, the lived reality of ubiquitous internet access may be a bit of a letdown.
nostalgia for internets of the past
Nostalgia shapes the memories of long-time users who have lost the Internet as a way of being. To paraphrase a characteristic recollection about the experience of exploring the online world of the 1990s: “Those were such great days, or should I say long nights.” But there is more at stake in the nostalgia of long-time users than fond memories. The stories that long-time users share about the diffusion and domestication of the Internet reflect underlying beliefs about how the Internet ought to be. In the hands of people with power and influence, narratives that glorify the Internet of the past will have material consequences for people who rely on the Internet of the present for personal expression and community ←28 | 29→support. Excessively sentimental attachment to the early Internet overlooks the most important change in the past two decades: the mutual visibility and increased access for people of different racial and gender identities, socio-economic classes, ages and abilities, geographic locations, and linguistic groups. Paradoxically, of course, the utopic structure of feeling of the 1990s motivated the work that opened the Internet to others.
Recently, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, each a long-time user, marshalled stories about the Internet’s past to advocate for a particular vision of its future. While each articulated a narrative of decline, they differed in their diagnoses of the problem. One offered a hopeful account of paths-not-taken while the other blamed Internet newcomers and social media speculators for shortsightedness and a lack of ambition. Comparing the uses of history in these two rhetorical moments underscores the importance of memory in the experience of the Internet as a way of being.
In late 2012, long-time blogger Anil Dash published “The Web We Lost,” lamenting a decline in “core values” that were once “fundamental to the web world” (2012a). Dash elaborated these values through a chronological series of examples of the design of social technologies and the collective behavior of industrial organizations. The blog post was widely read—Dash lists it among his personal favorite and most popular posts (2012b)—and, shortly after, Dash gave a talk on the topic at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (2013). In the spoken version, titled “How We Lost the Web,” Dash marshalled a narrative of decline to critique the enclosure of the Web by mutually incompatible social media systems, a process that Anne Helmond later characterized as “platformization” (2015).
In Dash’s narrative, the “early social web” ran from 1999 to 2005, the period immediately following the conclusion of Markham’s fieldwork. First, he acknowledged the scarce documentation of the period—“younger folks may not even know how the web used to be”—and, second, he established his credibility as a first-hand observer, “I got to witness it.” In Dash’s recollection, blogging was the preeminent activity of the period, a lingering effect of the privileged status of written communication during the 1990s. For Dash’s crew of early bloggers, the internet was a way of being: “[blogging] distinguished you and who you were.” This shared identity gave rise to a shared culture and a shared set of values involving openness, privacy, control, and creativity. In Dash’s narrative of decline, the platform that dominates today’s Internet offers no similar shared identity to its users: “Nobody’s a ‘Facebooker.’ ”
For Dash, the purpose of sharing this narrative of decline was to inspire an alternative vision of the future in his readers. His personal recollections of an earlier Internet suggest that the platformization of the internet was not pre-ordained, nor universally welcome. He describes the transition from self-hosted blogs to ←29 | 30→centralized platforms as happening “really, really quickly with almost no public discourse about the implications” (2013). In setting up the present conditions as aberrant, he offers a potential remedy for the future: “The reality is public policy can be a really, really effective part of addressing the problems in the technology industry” (2013). In effect, Dash pitched a “battle” between the past and the present, characterizing the decline as temporary and appealing to readers to join his pursuit toward a different future.
In contrast to Dash’s focus on values, a manifesto titled