encoded notions

Stop and think for a minute. Not just a wistful look back at the recent past, but a good hard look at the past few years. You’ve probably spent a considerable amount of your free time in those years on the web. Right now, I bet that you are reading this in a feed-reader of some sort, or were pointed to the newness of this blog post by a program or web application that tracked this site’s feed.

When I try to peer backwards in time through the mire of my mid-2003 introduction to feeds, I see murkiness; I can’t quite remember how I managed to find anything on the internet before feeds. Google? Searching? Random clicking?

Peering through a paradigm shift is hard.

Today I try to use web searches to probe for information and answers that are globbed under the category of “not new”. Anything that bears the slightest hint of a newness attribute sends me straight to Technorati. The rest of my web experience is “delivered” to me in my aggregator of choice.

I can now choose to be passive in my web-exploits and not feel ‘disconnected’.

From the sheer number of sites offering web feeds of one flavor or another, it is a fairly safe assumption that this notion of passive delivery is a catchy idea.

If I strap my thinking-cap down tightly, I can eke out a several memories of my pre-2003 web experience:

• I can remember browsing with IE4 on a dial-up connection—patiently waiting (ha! patience…on the web) for the images of a website to load into the <TABLE>s that were so popular.
• I can remember using Lycos and Metacrawler to search for answers to the kinds of questions that could not be answered by my local or school libraries—and not being thrilled with the craptastic results.
• I can remember keeping track of hundreds of bookmarks in my browser so that I could return to the wonderful fonts of information that I would manage to find by sheer luck.
• I can remember attempting to figure out this HTML and CSS ‘thing’ so I could experiment with making a website on Geocities.
• I can remember downloading free compilers for C programming.
• I can remember downloading the floppy-based installer for Slackware Linux and marveling at the sheer coolness of ‘changing the engine’ of my computer.
• I can remember stumbling across the entire network of Myst & Riven related websites, and eventually becoming a lurker on the fan-run mailing lists.
• I can remember when reading a website felt like sneaking into someone’s home while they were away at work.
• I can remember when the web could be organized into a clean little tree.
• I can remember when ICQ was cool and everyone in high school had a unique user ID number.
• I can remember before I had web access at home and could only access it from infrequent trips to my local library, and through various web-to-email services that I could use via my totally awesome free Juno email account.
• I can remember setting up Callwave so that I could keep the phone lines tied up with internet traffic and not have my parents get mad at me for ruining potential sales for their at-home business.
• I can remember how creepy it felt typing in my parents’ credit card number for the first time into a “128-bit secure” website.
• I can remember way before my introduction to the internet, when I used my local area BBSes to find shareware and neat things like The Anarchist Cookbook (the section describing the thermal sensitivity required to make nitroglycerin is a real hoot to a high-schooler when you read that a particularly sensitive step is exothermic and if you leave a certain thermal range you are instructed to “run…away”).
• I can remember trying to explain the web to my parents.
• I can remember stumbling (by random chance) across this “cool new search engine” that had truly excellent results.
• I can remember printing out webpages so that I could actually learn things in school when teachers were teaching to the rest of the class.

Finally, I can remember when I thought of the web as a thing, and not as a place. What I don’t remember is how I ever got anything out of the web at all. I don’t remember my process or my procedure for trailblazing. I can’t see that clearly through the fog of time.

It’s hard to point out when and where it started, but it sure does feel like something—a concept or an approach—infected the web and fundamentally altered its genetic makeup, but what? I don’t think “socialness” is the necessarily the right answer, though many people seem to think that it is. People have always been on the web—building it and shaping it.

I think that the culprit may have been a sort of mind-virus that had an origin and spread and amplified through the fertile interconnectedness provided by the fresh landscape of the web. It must have been an idea that made people shift their perceptions ever-so-slightly. Add that to the recursive, networked-structure of the web and all it takes is a tiny perturbation to send the whole system off in a completely new direction—taking us silently along for the ride.