Is the internet losing its charm?
Skyler Andersen
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There has been some talk about the internet losing its charm, so I thought I might offer some humble commentary on the subject and bring awareness to a part of internet culture that readers may have forgotten, or may never have had the opportunity to live. In honesty, I was born too late to experience the MySpace era of internet charm, but I do remember the days of Frutiger Aero and 3D design that dominated online or otherwise digital spaces in the 2000s and early 2010s.
One thing that is almost undeniable in todays age of corporate minimalism and flat polished design is that the creativity and customizability that used to exist online is gone. Many of the people whom I have heard from propose a cause for this decline--or death--of individual-level design choice: the advent of facebook and other early social media platforms. Though I have just said some nice things about MySpace, and while it is true that the customization in offered was far more extensive than modern social media, it (and other social media sites) represented a marked shift away from the personal web
In case you (like me) were too young to experience the personal web in its prime, I will expand on the obvious. An internet driven by individuals' intrinsic desires to create something via creative process that may be seen by their friends (or even someone across the world! wow!) was just more personal. Things were built with friends in mind, not with algorithms. The idea that a magical algorithm would appraise, rank, sort, and distribute your creative efforts as "content", rewarding you with "internet points" (i.e. likes, clout, etc.) was just nonsense.
Search engines, primarily, drove internet traffic. You may consider this an algorithm, as most engines were more than simple partial string matching programs, and usually they ranked searches according to relevance (informed just as today by descriptions, titles, and semantic html tags). I do not wish to be overzealous or presumptuous about a world I do not personally remember, but though there may have been algorithmic medaling in the age of the personal web (how pernicious...) I would wager that algorithms were not a primary influence or driver for creating, maintaining, and otherwise editing one's personal website.
If you have been on the internet at all in recent years, I am sure you've already heard plenty about algorithms in the generic sense (or as an inappropriate arbiter of creative value), so I will not drone on. I would instead like to pivot to some other aspects of digital charm. If you've ever studied (or independently created) art for some time, then you know that constraints are not necessarily the enemy of design. ASCII was certainly limited in terms of support for other languages or character systems, but with no room for anything but the essentials, and with a natural need to convey tone, came the emergence of text-based emoticons like :), ;), B), :P, and so many others.
Additionally, text based forums which did not yet have space to store photos gave rise to text based visual art like ASCII art, (e.g. like my hello message at the top of this post). The pure text based environment was not a limitation, but a constraint--and yes, those are different things.
What I propose is that some of these small or silly internet quirks stick around. ASCII art has been making a little bit of a comeback online recently. I have seen some artists pick up the mantle and embrace a text-based visual medium. I have also seen many people disable autocorrect features that change emoticons like :) into unicode emoji's. And further, SHOUTING BY USING ALL CAPS has persisted and served the test of time. All of these are informal text-based forms of expression. It is unique to the internet, and it is so cool that all of these trends have emerged and managed to be adopted by so many. (I particularly like how a tense tone is occasionally conveyed with spaces and italics. "l i k e t h i s...").
The internet has been rapidly changing for so long, and each and every year we have been promised that the future is here. Now many are starting to feel like either we missed the mark, or like the future is little dryer than we were hoping for. Gone is customizability and novelty. Posts on social media platforms are uniform, manufactured (by trends/algorithms), and engagement is largely driven by addiction and a hijacking of the dopamine/reward system. But, that doesn't mean we have to embrace this new reality. We can still choose simplicity, individuality, and choose small over big. We can still make charming little spaces outside of likes and scrolling. And, that is exactly what I am advocating for.
Right now, I am writing to a void. I don't know who, if anyone, will read this. As of this moment, I have no analytics outside of what I need for security purposes. I will have no way to know if any one real person sees this, and I won't get likes. I am okay with that. I am writing for the sake of writing, and writing for the sake of exploring ideas. There is no need for internet points, and no external validation required. Personally, I think this makes the process much more pure.
I hope that if anyone is reading this that maybe there can be a moment of inspiration. I hope that others can be inspired to write something, or create some digital space, without pressure, social media, likes, or other extrinsic motivators. I think the question of the title has been answered, but at the end of the day, I am still on a journey to find what charming corners of the internet remain, and I invite anyone reading this to join me.
