Social media is not what killed the web

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“Was the Internet really that bad?” I asked myself while reading the September 1995 issue of The Atlantic. He was reading the issue in digital format, displayed in Netscape Navigator 3 on a mid-90s Macintosh. Or, at least, in a browser and Mac software version provided on the OldWeb.Today website. The site hosts an emulator that connects to the Internet Archive’s registry of websites, providing a complete computing experience of the World Wide Web from three decades ago.

That experience was the evil I was reflecting on. Not the magazine itself, which began publishing online with this issue, whose cover story asked “How Lincoln Might Have Approached Abortion,” but the way he was reading it. The article page looked horrible: the nameplate was placed strangely and the text was difficult to read. Resizing the browser window fixed the layout, but my eyes and brain were still struggling to process the words. I was alive and online that fall 29 years ago, but in my memory the web was magical, like a portal to a new way of life, not a clunky mess like this. Now, having had the opportunity to travel back in time, I wonder if clumsiness wasn’t a midwife to that wonder.

Sometime in late 1994, a friend of mine started a program called Mosaic in the basement computer lab of the university library. “You have to see this,” he said as he began typing at akebono.stanford.edu. A gray page loaded with “Yahoo” printed at the top of a bulleted list of blue links. Nothing special, but I was impressed: the World Wide Web was still new and finding something useful was difficult. This new website with a fun name offered a directory of sites by category: computing, politics, entertainment, etc.

Read: Yahoo, the destroyer

Now, using the OldWeb emulator, I had transported myself to this era: 1995 to 1996. I didn’t know where to go on the web back then (Google wouldn’t arrive for a few years), so I went back to the primitive. Yahoo for help. Browsing through this directory again, I visited a website about careers in film and television, where I attended an interview with prop master David Touster (the most exciting part of his job: “the joy of creating a vision with creative people “). I visited a webzine about gender equality, illustrated with vaguely rendered line-drawn figures that, I remembered, were a bit aesthetic at the time. I visited a site called WebEthics.com to see how the early Internet thought about online dangers. The biggest one turned out to be money. Commercial websites must disclose their purpose, Web Ethics said. There was a list of websites that failed to do this, called the Dirty Dozen. The main entry, a site called All Business Network, was accused of being a stealth infomercial. Number 2 said “Coming Soon” and the other 10 spaces were blank.

That’s what the Internet felt like back then: promising but empty. no one says browsing the Web It no longer existed, but at the time the phrase made sense as a description of the grim and often frustrating task of finding entertainment. One online visitor felt like a beach bum waiting to catch a wave. (Zapping described a similar vibe one got when watching television). Many things would change in the following years. On the one hand, much to the chagrin of WebEthics.com’s operators, the Internet went commercial quickly. But even then, “content,” as we call it today, was rare. You could read an article or visit a website with brochures about a car or a vacuum cleaner, or even buy a book on Amazon. What you wouldn’t do is spend all day online.

Connectivity was one of the reasons. The library’s computer lab was connected via high-speed Ethernet, but home use still monopolized the phone line as bits were slowly extracted from a modem. Wi-Fi was not yet widely available and a computer was a go-to place inside the house. Using the OldWeb emulator on my laptop, I remembered how much we used to rely on the status bar at the bottom of the window (now mostly removed) for updates about the loading process of a web page and the little navigation animation; the Netscape one was a view of shooting stars, to distract us while we waited. Life online was mostly waiting.

Since each click caused more delay, one did more deliberately. Browsers displayed visited links in a different color (purple by default, instead of blue). They still do this, but no one cares anymore; Using the OldWeb browser reminded me that those purple links helped you navigate strange and arduous terrain. Yes, that’s where I wanted to go.either No, I’ve been there.

Once you reached your destination, you would face a series of distractions. Back then, screens were small, with low-resolution text and graphics. In The AtlanticOn the old website, the font was small and pixelated. Italics were not truly semi-cursive, with curved letterforms, but rather slanted versions of Roman. Lines of text ran across most of the screen without interruption. In order to read an entire article using Netscape on Macintosh System 7, I had to repeatedly interrupt myself to click the scroll bar button. These small glitches may have worn out our ability to concentrate. But we had no idea how much worse that problem could get.

Much has been made of the ways in which social networking sites made life on the Internet compulsive and all-consuming. Web searches and shopping have also turned people’s data into ads, leading them to spend increasing amounts of time and money online. But my visit to OldWeb revealed to me that computing device manufacturers and their underlying software made this transformation possible. Instagram or Google would have been attractive on the old Internet, but they are surely more so now, viewed on bright screens with the pixel density of a printed magazine. Before the Web was good (before PCs were good), you had trouble spending hours just in Word or Excel. Maybe that was a blessing.

It is easy to portray websites and browsers in OldWeb. Today, they are primitive and early steps along an evolutionary path. But at least some of what hadn’t yet been discovered about the network simply wasn’t worth pursuing. The World Wide Web of the 1990s was a place you entered for a while until it spit you out. As an activity, it had an end, which came when someone needed the phone, when eye strain overtook interest, when the virtual ocean failed to generate a wave worth surfing. Now the Internet goes on forever.