There was no such thing as the internet when I was a kid, and I didn't get properly online until I was 20. This was the mid-nineties, and online culture was breaking out from the initial chat rooms into something more mainstream, and I jumped on board the information superhighway with everybody else, even if we were driving virtual jalopies to get there.
Thirty years later, and I can still see echoes of those earliest internet presences out there. Some of them have evolved into whole new things (almost always not for the better), a lot of them are only there on the wayback machine, and some of them are as beautifully unchanged as the Space Jam website.
The first time I saw the internet in action was when my mate Karen downloaded the trailer for Stargate at the computer lab in her university. It was amazing, it only took six hours to download a tiny pixelated video, but that was enough to see the future, and that website that gave it to us is long, long gone.
The first thing I ever found for myself online was a review of a Superman comic that had only been released the week before, and I'm also not sure where that actually was, although I have memories of something called Mania or something like that, which updated its site every week! But I soon stumbled across the earliest versions of sites like Newsarama, and Comicbookresources, and they're still around today, even if I rarely bother to check them out.
It hurts more to look at CBR there days, because that was my first proper home, and the first place I made proper friends, and I barely recognise the site now, and desperately miss that orange and purple word balloon wallpaper. I first visited that site when it had only just evolved from a Kingdom Come message board, and started getting a little bit too much into the fan fiction.
It's still hanging in there, even if most of the articles it publishes these days maddingly disinterested in actual comics. There's a message board system still there, but it's not the same without a NEB, or a fly on the wall. I have used the wayback machine to look in on 1997 and see what I was doing on the site, but it's only a tease - it only captures the titles of message threads, so I can see that I had very strong opinions about the second year of Morrison's JLA, even if I can't actually see what they were.
Some of that original group from CBR still host lively role playing sessions on a semi-private message board. I don't join in, but it gives me a sense of enormous wellbeing to see them still at it.
I have less feelings about seeing that Ain't It Cool still exists, even if it seems to be another hollow shell of a site now. I have followed a couple pf the writers from that site on their various endeavors over the years and I wish them well, but like everybody else, I don't give a fuck about Harry anymore.
Sometimes I get grossly nostalgic for those younger days, and will suddenly remember something I haven't thought about in years, or even decades, and I'll go out there and discover to some surprise that Alvaro's message boards is still a thing. And I still occasionally drop by the SOI Hyperchat page, because that's the most 1996 thing in the world to me. And The Comics Journal still has a web presence, although it is nothing like the days of its very pumped up message board.
The early internet rapidly evolved, moved away from message boards and into the world of blogs, and fanboy rampages, progressive ruins and factual opinions. That all died off even faster - although some lunatics still do things like daily blogs like a fucking meathead - once social media came along.
Digital decay is a real thing - trying to find information about comics and music and movies from the late '00s is astonishingly hard - and so many of the sites I spent years visiting and reading and interacting with are just gone. But sometimes I still go looking for those early remnants of a digital life, and sometimes I even find some of my past.
No comments:
Post a Comment