Digital Dérive
My approach to engaging on this digital dérive started with me randomly choosing from a bank of words, phrases, or abbreviations. One of the important things when it came to searching on Google is that there is a setting at the top of the bar listed as ‘tools.’ This was extremely helpful to get a more robust search of the Internet, because it allows you to look at any Google search from since whenever something was published on the Internet. If you just search something in Google and just go through all the pages without changing the range of time of publications, you’ll mostly get news articles from this year, and various websites that might use what you searched. So the first word I searched was “jeff”, and this was before I changed the year range of the search options. Searching “jeff” brought up hundreds of articles and pieces on Jeff Bezos, and all of the related searches, except for one, were about Jeff Bezos. Going through the various pages of Google, I noticed that after you get past the wall of Jeff Bezos, you start to get a lot of personal/business websites for people named Jeff. Most of these sites, however, seem to be geared to the arts, and clicking on one of their website actually brought up a pretty cool artist: https://jeffsoto.com/.
My next search was for “gaming forum” because nothing is more funny or nostalgic than sitting on a forum discussing video games, and seeing the early Internet language or L33t speak. With this first search, I couldn’t really find any ancient forums that hadn’t been touched in years, and surprisingly, most of the ones I did find STILL had people posting on them within the past year or two. So I had to broaden my search, instead I searched for “Resident Evil how to beat tyrant” and changed the search settings from 1997–2002, which gave a lot more results for specifically what I was looking for. I scrolled down and found a lot of more popular gaming forums that are still active today, but just a lot of ancient posts, and looking at the replies you can just see how much language on the Internet has changed, people just using different phrases, spelling of wording that is so off that it almost seems like they did it on purpose. And one of my favorite things about looking at these forums is everyone’s old profile pictures and their forum signatures, because you can tell just how old the pictures are through the quality, and lots of people using gifs for their profile pictures.
The final thing I searched for was “pizza time” with the same year search range from 1996–2005, and it brought up a lot of results of old pizza chains that haven’t updated their websites since they first came into business. One thing I saw was a forum of people complaining about their pizza delivery times, talking about they might give you a free pizza after a long wait, and slowly talking about the delivery drivers accidently hitting someone or getting into an accident as to why their pizza was late. After looking through the results, it’s hard to tell whether or not a lot of these pizza chains are still in business or not, a lot of the ones I clicked on were updated to modern designs and are likely still in business, but a lot of the other ones were still using the greenpepper.jpg repeating background, and the most flat, ancient font possible. If you think about it, it’s almost like the results could be digital ruins of old sites or businesses that no longer exist, seeing them still existing gives you a strange sense of time because of seeing the development of sites over time, having them change design as media changes is a really strange feeling just knowing that someone made that website and either forgot or abandoned it on their own. But that was my digital dérive, it was a really interesting experience, and I’ll still never get over looking at old gaming forums and posts.
