Web 0.2
The kids, they don’t understand. They don't. Acting so proprietorial about the internet, with their MySpace and YouTube and iTunes, as if they had just happened upon this cool abandoned factory in the woods, and decided to kit it up as their clubhouse. They don't know that the internet is ours- we watched it grow, we built it up, those are our initials etched into its roofbeams. Of course, things were very different back then. Back then, there was none of your broadband or skype or always-on connections. Frankly, it was a struggle, kitting the house out for the internet. I remember the whole family pitching in, my sister fiddling with the aerial, while dad tweaked the whiskers on the monitor, trying to find hotmail. After an age, the static eased, and a dim, fuzzy picture emerged on the screen.
“Can you see what it is?” dad asked.
“It looks like a lot of hamsters dancing,” mam said.
Dad thumped the back of the computer, hard.
In those early days, you learnt a lot about website design. Originality was the key. A guaranteed way to stand out was to tweak your text colour and your background colour until you hit a combination that had never been seen before in three thousand years of graphic art. If reading the front page felt like being forcefed spoonfuls of sugar through your eyes, you knew you were onto something big. The next important thing was to whack an enormous, metallic-effect counter in the centre of the page, ensuring that visitors' eyes were drawn to this before anything else on your site. Depending on your traffic levels, this was a great way of either telling your visitors how unimportant you were, or how unimportant they were. And finally, you linked your site to every other website on the net, because you were Irish and you didn't want to appear rude. All these links made surfing a uniquely circular experience, like driving down an endless ring-road composed of nothing but roundabouts.
Of course you could always make use of a "search engine". Back then, there wasn’t just one search engine, there were dozens, and they were all equally shambolic. Performing a search was like engaging a private detective firm staffed exclusively by autistic savants. They'd either come back with nothing, or empty the entire internet into your lap. Some search engines even made it into the dictionary. For instance, if you were going out to a restaurant, you might make sure to "jeeves" your date. This meant telling her reams of useless information about other people who shared her surname, most of whom were dead. That way, you got to eat her dinner too.
Back then, there was only one webcam in the world, and it was owned by an American college student called Jenny, who left it on around the clock, and it was watched by millions of men the world over, on the basis that Jenny at some stage in her life might possibly get undressed. Now those men are in their early forties, hunched over their workstations, in the all-white boxroom that used to be the loft- no, sweetie, this is Daddy’s office, you can play downstairs- trawling the net for live feeds of young women from the former Soviet Union performing sex acts on Vietnamese pot bellied pigs, the pot bellied pig lovers really doing it for them right now, and occasionally- no, for the last time, you can’t come in, Daddy’s busy, Daddy’s doing important grown-up work-occasionally they shed a little tear for innocent Jenny, and her apartment, whose dimensions they still know intimately and which, to be honest, they sometimes dream about, and they wonder how Jenny looks today, and what age she might be, and how she feels about the webcam now, and how she might react if they introduced themselves to her in the street, and what they might talk about, and where they might go later, for a drink, and whether, if the mood was right, she might consider trying some pig porn.
“Can you see what it is?” dad asked.
“It looks like a lot of hamsters dancing,” mam said.
Dad thumped the back of the computer, hard.
In those early days, you learnt a lot about website design. Originality was the key. A guaranteed way to stand out was to tweak your text colour and your background colour until you hit a combination that had never been seen before in three thousand years of graphic art. If reading the front page felt like being forcefed spoonfuls of sugar through your eyes, you knew you were onto something big. The next important thing was to whack an enormous, metallic-effect counter in the centre of the page, ensuring that visitors' eyes were drawn to this before anything else on your site. Depending on your traffic levels, this was a great way of either telling your visitors how unimportant you were, or how unimportant they were. And finally, you linked your site to every other website on the net, because you were Irish and you didn't want to appear rude. All these links made surfing a uniquely circular experience, like driving down an endless ring-road composed of nothing but roundabouts.
Of course you could always make use of a "search engine". Back then, there wasn’t just one search engine, there were dozens, and they were all equally shambolic. Performing a search was like engaging a private detective firm staffed exclusively by autistic savants. They'd either come back with nothing, or empty the entire internet into your lap. Some search engines even made it into the dictionary. For instance, if you were going out to a restaurant, you might make sure to "jeeves" your date. This meant telling her reams of useless information about other people who shared her surname, most of whom were dead. That way, you got to eat her dinner too.
Back then, there was only one webcam in the world, and it was owned by an American college student called Jenny, who left it on around the clock, and it was watched by millions of men the world over, on the basis that Jenny at some stage in her life might possibly get undressed. Now those men are in their early forties, hunched over their workstations, in the all-white boxroom that used to be the loft- no, sweetie, this is Daddy’s office, you can play downstairs- trawling the net for live feeds of young women from the former Soviet Union performing sex acts on Vietnamese pot bellied pigs, the pot bellied pig lovers really doing it for them right now, and occasionally- no, for the last time, you can’t come in, Daddy’s busy, Daddy’s doing important grown-up work-occasionally they shed a little tear for innocent Jenny, and her apartment, whose dimensions they still know intimately and which, to be honest, they sometimes dream about, and they wonder how Jenny looks today, and what age she might be, and how she feels about the webcam now, and how she might react if they introduced themselves to her in the street, and what they might talk about, and where they might go later, for a drink, and whether, if the mood was right, she might consider trying some pig porn.
posted by Ben Good at 4:07 pm
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