The DIY internet
Oct. 21st, 2023 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12A few hours ago today, as the result of diving down a particular internet rabbit hole, I was reminded of a song with which I'd been briefly obsessed, back during the years I was a PhD student and spent most of my days at home, alone, writing, listening to music — frequently the same songs on continuous repeat for hours. I don't own physical copies of music any more — I haven't owned a device that could play CDs for years, and I finally cleared out my 1990s CD collection from my mum's house when I was in Australia in April. I don't own digital copies either — I used to have an extensive digital library of uploaded CDs and playlists (about which, more later), but that vanished at some point when the hard drive of my current computer had to be replaced in 2014 — and I don't listen to stuff on Spotify either. So basically the way I listen to music now, and have done since 2014, is to go to Youtube, and search for the album, live set, song, or playlist, and play it.
Doing this is always an interesting lesson in ephemerality. Frequently, the artists themselves have uploaded their own video clips or albums to their own official channel, but most of the time, this stuff is a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes I'll come back years later and find the same version of that 2001 album is there, uploaded by some random person in 2008, and sometimes it goes through various iterations. In any case, the specific song I was looking for used to exist as an official video clip, but now the first version I could find was uploaded by some Dutch guy in 2009, using the sort of cheesy, silly DIY tricks people used to employ when they had the audio files, but no appropriate video file: cycling through a slide show of photos of the artists, Amsterdam canals in twilight, crowds at shows, etc. I found myself oddly charmed — and incredibly nostalgic. It felt like an artefact from an older, slower, weirder internet, and reminded me of the sorts of things people used to do, back when we were trying to figure out how to be a community, fifteen or twenty years ago.
These specific artists (the song is a collaboration) were introduced to me by an old friend from my Philip Pullman forum days, the person who is responsible for about 1/3 of my post-secondary school musical tastes. He used to make these incredibly elaborate multipart playlists (frequently each part would have 20 or 30 songs), with cover art, detailed stories explaining the playlists' thematic coherence and the reasoning behind the specific ordering of the songs, his emotional state when making them, etc, etc, and would upload the files for the rest of us to download. Although I know many people who've introduced me to music, or with whom I share musical tastes, he's the only person I've ever met who understood and spoke about music in the same way that I do, in a way that I find extremely hard to articulate (to the point that I basically don't talk about music, other than saying 'I like this,' anymore), but really the crucial point is that these playlist efforts took hours and hours of work, about five of us ever downloaded them, and only I ever really talked with him about them.
Another one of my friends from the forum made an entire website — with message boards, art galleries, chat rooms, etc — for his group of schoolfriends, when he was fourteen or fifteen or so. He also made webcomics with another schoolfriend, and I remember at one point he used to give all of us forum friends printed bookmarks or cards with characters from the webcomics as birthday presents. He paid for all of this out of his own money, and I don't think anyone beyond his immediate social circles ever looked at any of it.
Another friend from this forum had a Wordpress blog where she'd write detailed reviews of Alfonso Cuarón films, or linkspams of news about, or interviews with, Cuarón — again, entirely for the love of it; I don't think anyone outside her immediate social circles ever read it (and even then only her fellow Cuarón admirers).
I could give more examples, but you get the idea. This was the pre-social media internet, and everything feels — with hindsight — much more effort, but with results that were comparably messy, handmade, and small-scale, done without any interest in monetisation or virality or even likes and subscriptions. I'm sure you could give similar examples from your own experiences, if you were part of any online communities back then. It was the equivalent of the Dutch guy uploading his ridiculous, clunky graphics-ridden slideshow video to Youtube, offered up at once to a small handful of friends, and to the vastness of the unknown internet: I like this; maybe you'll like it too.
I try not to indulge these episodes of self-satisfied nostagia too often: for starters, it's very possible that this kind of thing is still going on in corners of the internet that I don't frequent. (Why is nobody talking about this?: the eternal internet lament, when what is really meant is why is nobody talking about it in spaces where I'm likely to listen? — with my luck, this specific kind of internet exists on platforms that make me recoil in visceral horror, like TikTok.) Certainly Dreamwidth itself is the closest thing I've found to it (for which I am eternally grateful to the community of people I've met here). But every so often, I remember, and find myself missing the slowness of it, and the smallness, and the sheer messy, handmade earnestness of it all.
Doing this is always an interesting lesson in ephemerality. Frequently, the artists themselves have uploaded their own video clips or albums to their own official channel, but most of the time, this stuff is a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes I'll come back years later and find the same version of that 2001 album is there, uploaded by some random person in 2008, and sometimes it goes through various iterations. In any case, the specific song I was looking for used to exist as an official video clip, but now the first version I could find was uploaded by some Dutch guy in 2009, using the sort of cheesy, silly DIY tricks people used to employ when they had the audio files, but no appropriate video file: cycling through a slide show of photos of the artists, Amsterdam canals in twilight, crowds at shows, etc. I found myself oddly charmed — and incredibly nostalgic. It felt like an artefact from an older, slower, weirder internet, and reminded me of the sorts of things people used to do, back when we were trying to figure out how to be a community, fifteen or twenty years ago.
These specific artists (the song is a collaboration) were introduced to me by an old friend from my Philip Pullman forum days, the person who is responsible for about 1/3 of my post-secondary school musical tastes. He used to make these incredibly elaborate multipart playlists (frequently each part would have 20 or 30 songs), with cover art, detailed stories explaining the playlists' thematic coherence and the reasoning behind the specific ordering of the songs, his emotional state when making them, etc, etc, and would upload the files for the rest of us to download. Although I know many people who've introduced me to music, or with whom I share musical tastes, he's the only person I've ever met who understood and spoke about music in the same way that I do, in a way that I find extremely hard to articulate (to the point that I basically don't talk about music, other than saying 'I like this,' anymore), but really the crucial point is that these playlist efforts took hours and hours of work, about five of us ever downloaded them, and only I ever really talked with him about them.
Another one of my friends from the forum made an entire website — with message boards, art galleries, chat rooms, etc — for his group of schoolfriends, when he was fourteen or fifteen or so. He also made webcomics with another schoolfriend, and I remember at one point he used to give all of us forum friends printed bookmarks or cards with characters from the webcomics as birthday presents. He paid for all of this out of his own money, and I don't think anyone beyond his immediate social circles ever looked at any of it.
Another friend from this forum had a Wordpress blog where she'd write detailed reviews of Alfonso Cuarón films, or linkspams of news about, or interviews with, Cuarón — again, entirely for the love of it; I don't think anyone outside her immediate social circles ever read it (and even then only her fellow Cuarón admirers).
I could give more examples, but you get the idea. This was the pre-social media internet, and everything feels — with hindsight — much more effort, but with results that were comparably messy, handmade, and small-scale, done without any interest in monetisation or virality or even likes and subscriptions. I'm sure you could give similar examples from your own experiences, if you were part of any online communities back then. It was the equivalent of the Dutch guy uploading his ridiculous, clunky graphics-ridden slideshow video to Youtube, offered up at once to a small handful of friends, and to the vastness of the unknown internet: I like this; maybe you'll like it too.
I try not to indulge these episodes of self-satisfied nostagia too often: for starters, it's very possible that this kind of thing is still going on in corners of the internet that I don't frequent. (Why is nobody talking about this?: the eternal internet lament, when what is really meant is why is nobody talking about it in spaces where I'm likely to listen? — with my luck, this specific kind of internet exists on platforms that make me recoil in visceral horror, like TikTok.) Certainly Dreamwidth itself is the closest thing I've found to it (for which I am eternally grateful to the community of people I've met here). But every so often, I remember, and find myself missing the slowness of it, and the smallness, and the sheer messy, handmade earnestness of it all.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-21 05:31 pm (UTC)I still run across it sometimes because of my love of some old fandoms where the fanbase is often older than me and they've spent years dedicated to only one fandom. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV fandom is a perfect example of that.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-21 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-21 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 10:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 10:24 am (UTC)The common factor in all the examples given above, is that all people described (apart from the Dutch Youtube uploader, about whom I know nothing) were secondary school or university students at the time. Apart from my friend who made the playlists — he was in his late 20s, but worked night shifts in a hotel, had extremely insomniac and erratic sleep patterns, and spent most of his waking hours online. The point is, we had the time to devote to creating these kinds of projects, even knowing that only twenty other people would ever see them, without it impinging on our lives very much. These days, I don't have that kind of uninterrupted free time.
But I really mourn the loss of that internet, and know in my bones that it was better, and kinder.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 02:14 am (UTC)I've played around with building an old domain network a la my high school years again, but they're a lot of work! And the internet really is a different place nowadays. I worry about things like separation of work and fan life and back end development when as a teenager I just cut up a random picture, stuck it in a table, and called it a day.
Have you surfed randomly around Neocities? It's not quite the same but it is a serious nostalgia hit and heals my spirit every time I visit.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 10:33 am (UTC)I worry about things like separation of work and fan life and back end development when as a teenager I just cut up a random picture, stuck it in a table, and called it a day.
I worry about this a lot — not for myself, since that horse really has bolted (it's incredibly easy to link my real-world identity to my fannish one based on things I've said over the years on Dreamwidth, and I basically operate on the assumption that anything I've done online has to be something I'd be comfortable with everyone in my life knowing, without making any deliberate efforts to connect the various parts of my life together and hoping that I'm unimportant enough that no one else bothers to do so in a malicious way) — but I worry a lot about it for younger fans, and just younger people in general. The old DIY internet that I'm lamenting here was so small and fragmented, and it was just one part of a person's life. Now the social, communal internet bleeds into everything, and there's much more pressure for things to be joined up and connected, preferably under a single real-world identity. It worries me a lot.
I've heard exactly the praises you're singing about Neocities — I really must have a look!
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 03:00 pm (UTC)YES.
I love this post very much and feel much the time same.
I think of the kind of comment memes we used to have where people would recommend, say, a specific song to each person on their flist. Or the way we would leave long, long reviews on each others' fics. Did we all just have more time then? Was it that we were in college and then our early 20s and so we didn't have as much on our plates? But it was lovely, and I miss it a lot.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-26 10:33 am (UTC)I do also think that it was because no one had figured out how to monetise social media at that point, and the spaces where we congregated were not seen as appropriate platforms for marketing ourselves or trying to make money from our creative endeavours (and indeed any such behaviour would have been frowned on and the person frozen out of the community). Certainly I don't remember any sense of competing for replies or likes or engagement (although I guess this happened a bit with fanworks) — it was much more like having a very weird, asynchronous, long-running conversation.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-27 01:03 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing these memories! They make me nostalgic too. "Handmade earnestness" is a wonderful way to describe it.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-27 05:42 pm (UTC)