What happened to the internet?
This month AOL will finally shut down it’s instant messaging service AIM. When I first heard the news in October, I tried to log onto my account, partly to pay my respects and partly to dip my toes in the sweet water of nostalgia. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten my password so I’ll never really know what lies in that digital graveyard. But my friends who were able to log on succumbed to nostalgia as they read through old messages and reminisced about how AIM had been the stage for friendships, budding teenage romance, gossip, and fights fought through passive aggressive away message.
AIM dominated the internet in the early 2000s, and now that it’s finally retiring, it really feels like the end of an era. It got me thinking, what happened to the internet of the early 2000s? Has the internet really changed that much, or am I just feeling the regular, old longing we all feel for the foundational experiences of our childhood?
It’s hard not to feel a certain fondness for the internet of my childhood and early adolescence. It seemed like a wilder, freer place, where people gathered in small tribes over similar interests. It was where I was introduced to the addictive world of fan fiction, first through random LiveJournals, and then through the more centralized fanfiction.net. Finally, here were people I could talk to about interests that none of my real friends shared. The internet was simultaneously intimate and expansive. It was full of weird, wondrous distractions that you could indulge in when you wanted a break from the drudgery of day to day life.
But over the years, the internet has gone from being a clubhouse I hung out in to an indispensable part of my daily life. From the moment I open my eyes to the moment I shut them, I’m plugged in. It’s where I study, hang out, shop, listen to music, read, watch shows, and waste countless hours down the Reddit rabbit hole. Sometimes I feel like I’m just running in a circle, hooked into the same websites day after day, mindlessly refreshing pages so I can feel an occasional jolt in my brain. I inhabit the real world only transiently, like a motorist at a rest stop. Reality itself seems to have shrunk. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by a heavy claustrophobia, as if the world is collapsing in on itself, becoming smaller and denser and perfectly contained enough to access through a single click.
And what exactly is the real world anymore? The line has become increasingly blurred as we depend more on the internet for everything from entertainment to friendship to the practical aspects of daily life. We’ve gradually migrated our ‘real life’ online, and the internet, which once used to be a voluntary space, has become a compulsory part of modern life. The natural physical barriers that used to keep our lives somewhat compartmentalized have broken down. As a kid, I could go on the internet and do about one thing at a time. Now, I go online just to read the news and end up being distracted by Facebook or an email or a targeted google ad reminding me of the boots I’ve been eyeing. There’s no separation anymore. There’s no escape.
There’s definitely a corporate aspect to it as well. Facebook, Google, and Amazon were once just nice, little internet companies; now they dominate the internet landscape. What once was a space dotted with quirky, personal blogs and simple chat rooms has slowly become more streamlined, sanitized, and monetized. Recently I’ve been getting the feeling I’m being watched, not by anyone in particular, but by a vast network of algorithms trained to identify every nuance in my shopping habits. Sure, its less annoying than the pop up ads of the early internet but it represents a far more insidious strategy of sponsored social media posts and targeted advertisements made to seep slowly into your consciousness. More than anything, the internet of today seems to be a hunting ground for companies to find out what we like and then sell it to us.
Even internet content has a corporate veneer. Journalism isn’t journalism as much as it is click bait and manufacturing page views. The bright, glossy videos that loop constantly on Facebook and Instagram are products of media conglomerates like BuzzFeed, designed less with an eye for creativity and more with respect to product placement and ad revenue. Even the blogosphere seems to have left behind the angsty, confessional writing of early blogging platforms like Xanga in favor of more polished, SEO conscious language. I’m not trying to sound ungrateful for all the interesting content we have now, but I think the internet has lost some of the charm that came with people just making things for fun. Now even the interesting stuff is tainted by the knowledge that internet celebrity is a viable career option. It makes the work appear less genuine and more calculated, like it was produced only to meet a growing demand for fresh content. Even the word ‘content’ sounds so bland; it reduces us to mindless content consumers. But that’s what we’ve become: content consumers trapped by our own flighty attention spans, and the power to continuously find novel distractions. When everything is new and interesting, is anything new and interesting?
Accompanying this inevitable migration to the web is the transformation of our online identity. Back in the day, the internet was where you went when you wanted to be weird. Now it’s where you show off your best self. There’s still pockets of the internet where anonymity is the norm, but increasingly, full participation in the digital world requires us to merge our offline and online identities. The most popular social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, are tied tightly to our real identities. We edit ourselves relentlessly on these sites to present the most likable version of our selves. Maybe it’s because we understand that our online activities have a real world impact now. We can’t just go online and say whatever want on Facebook or Twitter without the repercussions rippling offline. We’re judged more harshly for what we say because the internet has become a legitimate public space. And while this can be a great thing for transparency and common decency online, it also means there’s less of the freewheeling weirdness that made the early internet such a fascinating place.
The internet used to be a place people went because they wanted to. Although people certainly nurtured their internet personas before, having one wasn’t a prerequisite for social connection. Now, it’s absurd if you don’t have any social media accounts. People don’t trust you if they don’t know what you’re up to; if they can’t find a single trace of you on the web. We have the extra anxiety of making sure that our social media accounts are agreeable and welcoming, sometimes even more so than our real personalities. It’s not that people didn’t obsess over their internet identities before. I remember anxiously refreshing my fan fiction reviews page, hoping for a hit of validation.
But what’s changed is that our internet personas used to be our crazy alter-egos, but now they’re fake, polished projections of our real selves. We used to be someone else on the internet, but now we’re just our selves. I could still disassociate my old blog accounts from myself. I understood that who I was on the other side of the screen didn’t need to be the ‘real me’ to feel authentic. Now my social media accounts all feel like the real me, or at least like flattering approximations of me. Social media hasn’t necessarily granted us new identities as much as it has forced us to extend our personalities online.
I’ll admit my nostalgia for the ‘old internet’ is tainted. My generation happened to come of age just as the internet was also coming into its own, so it’s hard to tell whether the pining I feel for the simpler days of dial up is pure, or distorted by a general fondness for my childhood. Either way, I rarely feel the same wonder I used to when logging onto the web. Instead, I feel a vague sense of dread. The internet has become such a pervasive entity that participation in it doesn’t even register as a conscious choice anymore. I find myself opening up Facebook without even realizing it. It’s become an anxious tic, taking the place of pre-internet habits like tapping my pen or twiddling my thumbs. Getting off the internet feels like emerging from a bender, with only a hazy recollection of the hours before. I wake up and sit down to my computer, and then 16 hours later, I get up and go to sleep. Repeat until I’m dead.
By living our lives online, we’ve reduced whatever was magical about the internet to something tiresome. I know I’ll never get that giddy, ‘Christmas morning’ feeling I used to get when the internet felt like a little secret you could hold in the palm of your hand. There’s never going backwards with technology, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we can return to the days of AIM and Angelfire. The interent’s influence is too vast now; its a dome we live under, one that was constructed when we weren’t looking.
So where do I go, now that the internet’s become just as dull and exhausting as my real life? Now that the internet is my real life? That’s what I find myself wondering in the rare moments when I’m not online, like when I’m driving or showering or making tea in the cold, quiet hours before school. The only place to go is offline. Out into the real world where if I let my mind wander long enough, I start to notice things like the ugly wallpaper in my favorite take out place or the city skyline at sunset. The world opens up again, green and crisp, as vast as I once hoped the internet to be.
