A Personal Archeology of the Internet
Introduction & The Early Years Welcome to my webpage.That's what they all used to say, isn't it? Like
Everything was just a little bit ugly, and always animated, the novelty of animation on a webpage outranked the ugliness. There was always a welcome, it demarcated the start of your visit in someone's domain, you are now entering somewhere that does not belong to you, and that is very strikingly made by someone else.
My world, not anyone else's. Some went as far as making a splash page, large intricate graphics you had to click through before you could even see anything else. In 2024 this seems counter-intuitive, we want instant connection and readability of websites now, a smooth internet experience where there is no need for a welcome to my realm, lest it scares off the potential customer, viewer, subscriber. A welcome, still, can be found, very often if someone is selling a service, or trying to connect to make you form a parasocial connection on a youtube channel. Back then, too, of course.
I used to save pictures like these on my father's work computer, which was mainly how my sister and I browsed the internet until 2006. To a child, they hold something completely magical in their aesthetics, I think now it's the same wonder of early moving images. A computer was like an electronic library, you did not expect to see anything that moved among the text. Mostly, they were animals, however, especially ones in 3D, my aesthetic senses were not very developed beyond neon colours, animals and as "realistic" as I could get them. I would open google image search and type in "horse gif" and look through hundreds of pages of results, most of which were repeats, trying to find my favorites. What comes off as a bit funny now, is how vast and old the internet seemed to me as a child; I entered into a space full of its own very set cultures, aesthetics and modes of being. It felt like travelling to different countries. The fact that many of the gifs I will be deploying on these pages were probably not more than a few years older than I was when I started seriously browsning, feels so bizarre in contrast. The internet has always moved fast, and moves much faster now, you can date a meme down to the year and season by its style and artifacts.
As is already apparent, this site is very personal, oriented firmly towards my own nostalgia, and most likely not of great interest to anyone else. To an extent, this is also the goal. I recently read about time, and how we can prolong and erase it through memory, as Tolstoy writes "unlived life is that which is not remembered." - this here is a life on the internet that is lived and remembered, but it only continues to live as long as I personally remember. If I don't think about it, the memory will athropy, and the life slowly becomes unlived as its fragmented evidence within online systems also slowly disappear to the march of technology and the death of servers. As Maralie on Medium put it "We are historians of our own lives, and everything we document is embedded forever into the fabric of the internet." Her work We Have Always Lived in the Palace, where she revisits her internet youth within the Doll Palace and its culture and people, through re-excavating her own decade old posts, profile and social encounters, is something I return to often, and greatly motivated this work. The fact that if Maralie had undertaken this excavation today, in 2024, it would not be possible to such a great degree due to the degredation of old internet (the website is dead and only accessible through the web.archive captures and our memories) is not lost on me. I feel like I'm too late in starting already, as the places I grew up within are mostly disappeared, and if they still remain they are permanently different with their old selves inaccessible to me. But I still remember. For now.
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