Do you remember MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal and even Gaia Online? Something I remember all of these early social media websites possessing was the intensely customizable “personal-public webpage.” It was like a digital room in a house that you shared with all of your friends. Luckily, I was a user of these websites in high school and I remember the infinite variability of expression inherent in these sites’ design features being a popular topic of conversation. It was a way of sharing who you were to your peers without the burden of the isolated webpage. It was something that was yours in a collection of what was shared.
During this period of the internet as well was popular the “auteur” website - people who would be called “content creators” today who curated and built websites of their webcomics, cartoons and writing that showcased who they were to the world. Even the social versions of these projects, such as PostSecret, allowed wildly freeform expression from strangers (albeit in a mediated form).
Due to the rise of Facebook, Youtube, and later Instagram and even Medium, Substack and the like, increasingly people are confined to the “filled form” online profile culture that ranks submitted work according to algorithms. Not to mention restrictions to content length and medium…I don’t know how these algorithms work, but I imagined for a moment today that they are increasingly catered toward promoting what has already “worked” in the sea of submitted content. How do new voices, or people trying to find their voice, rank? Do the existing protocols enable breakthrough talent or subtly influence and encourage people to find what already works according to the site? Additionally we have the problem of the “response of silence,” which is a rather new topic on my mind I hope to write about later.
Auteur websites hardly exist, and those that do that are popular seem largely catered to the (nearly priestly) caste of programmers or are otherwise marketed as “portfolio” websites. And again, we have the “island” problem of lone websites, which is not inviting to new or more casual users of the internet.
Not to mention how the Big Tech companies can end up restricting your ability to produce “the information of yourself” once they’ve captured a big enough audience. I remember a time when Facebook let you publish writing pages like blog posts to display on your profile - maybe it was a dream? - whatever it was, it’s all gone now, and if it did happen the website (perhaps inadvertently) restricted the voices of users. Tumblr is probably one of the last big websites that gave users this high degree of expressive freedom. I don’t remember what happened, but boy I got repelled as a user at one point and it seems rather dead and insipid now. RIP. Not to mention all the distrust that the big social media sites now inspire for even the average internet user like myself.
To me, it seems the status quo direction of the internet and social media sites mediates interaction that limits digital creativity. This does not disable the population who is digitally curious (in fact, I would guess it emboldens a generation of programmers) but it does handicap those who are digitally curious but not digitally curious “enough.”
Even Apple is guilty of this promoting this cultural direction, and increasingly confines users to their prescribed direction of how their devices are meant to be used. So much for the inventors of the iPod.
What is the internet like for young people and even casual adult users right now? Are people confined to the cell-like culture of the filled-form profile wherein they must share only information about themselves from the outside world into a digital funnel - without the intermediary form of having a digital room of their own? How does this impact our “real world” culture?