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Image is from GifCities, originally found on the "Friends of Epping Forest" GeoCities website in 2009
I’m a child of the internet, and feel very lucky to be a millennial that experienced the best of analog, and digital in my early years. I was a regular on MySpace, Tumblr, and StumbleUpon. I had a Xanga and a LiveJournal. I met friends on the internet that I keep up with to this day. Of course there were downsides - AIM bullying, skyrocketing screen time, diminishing body image - but luckily, nothing I imagine as brutal as today’s adolescents face online.
I know the internet has become half burden, half utility for most people. There’s no room for digital illiteracy anymore, and so many are left behind, it’s breeding hateful rhetoric, and loaded with misinformation. Ultimately however - I think it is a good place where people (mostly) do good things, if at a minimum it simply reminds users of just how massive the world is, and how many people are living in it.
Below are some bits of the internet that I’ve recently been enjoying and/or I find special and inspiring.
1. GIFCITIES
The Internet Archive is one of the most important resources around! The importance of documentation of what has been one of humanity’s fastest-progressing eras cannot be overstated. For their 20th anniversary they made the GifCities site - scraping GeoCities websites (one of the earliest web-hosting services available!) for those sparkly, pixel-y GIFs that aesthetically define the age of early internet. It’s where I found the GIFs I use across my website! Clicking through the origin websites is a great way to feel both old and small.
2. RADIOOOOO
This is a great alternative to spotify shuffle. You peruse the globe and choose a country and choose a decade to get a geographic and time-specific playlist! You choose the “vibe” (slow, fast, or weird), and recently they’ve added a new “taxi” mode where you can cobble together your own playlist by choosing a few different countries/decades. It’s a really fun way to listen to and explore new music.
3. MAPPED
I haven’t used this yet - but I think Common Knowledge are incredibly cool, and this is a brilliant idea. Geographic data is so important for organisers looking to get people together, to do things like structure organizing, or even build critical mass at demonstrations. Maps are one of my favorite ways to visualize data in general - and I have to imagine that this tool, which syncs back to a CRM will become incredibly useful to UK organizers looking to understand their supporters better and mobilize them.
When I was learning how to code I somehow stumbled upon Nicole He’s digital art. Innovative, quirky, timely, and thoughtful - I was immediately inspired. Humans are constantly finding new mediums to be creative with, and it feels like Nicole has personally discovered at least 8.
5. SOMEBODY APP
It’s no longer active - but it’s still exciting it ever was. Multimedia artist/writer/magical creature Miranda July made this app in 2014 as sort of an antidote to social media. Basically - you would send a message to your friend, but it wouldn’t go to your friend, rather a Somebody user closest to your friend who would then deliver the message verbally. Something about distance, something about place, something about connection - what a beautiful way to use fiber-optic cables.
6. PERCHANCE RANDOM IMGUR GENERATOR (NSFW)
Fair warning - this random image generator occasionally delivers racist, homophobic, pornographic, etc images. Perchance is a platform for creating and sharing random generators - and when I saw this imgur generator posted, I spent an hour clicking and scrolling. Although there were quite a few Russian gaming memes, 4chan screenshots, and porn stills - there were also genuinely frank and moving images. Imgur has been the main online image sharing platform for so long, it’s where many teens like me originally posted hazy webcam selfies and found too-bright SLR pics of parties happening in far away cities. There’s something involving happenstance and breadth that I find really poetic about tools like these - even if I risk seeing things I wish I didn’t when I use them.