Remember the Internet?

I was searching for references sake for Perry Farel's 'Letters to Xiola' last week and it turns out that google's top result for this poem would be exactly the page I found back in 1998 when searching for a transcript on the antique that is Yahoo!

And I felt nostalgic. Because (I'm aware I'm being hypocritical) but I just think that all the leaps and bounds the internet has made, although I would never refute how good they appear to be on paper are just plain shit.

User generated content is overhyped. Infact Tim Sale in his book black and white summed up my feelings exactly in describing the 'black and white' comic explosion of the 80's (arguably the exact trend that has made it to Melbourne now in the form of zines).

"It was a lot like punk rock, you suddenly had this broadly accepted notion that everyone had a right to say what they wanted. But just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to say"

And there too I am being hypocritical. While I have never uploaded anything to Youtube, I have drawn my own comic and I do generate blog posts as a 'user'

But my main objection is how carried away we all get with new possibilities. I don't know what it is called, but I can think of numerous examples. Like in the late 90's reign of terror known as 'New Metal' every kid wanted a 7-string Ibanez or a 5-string bass. But the contradiction was that people hadn't actually mustered up any talent on the oh-so-seemingly-pedestrian 6-string guitars, or 4-string basses. Which mind you Korn and Limp Bizkit never managed to actually generate any significant contribution to the guitar, when compared to someone like Tom Morello who blew the 6-string wide open with his new style of play.

Or the desire for a carbon fibre road bike, when you can't currently push your aluminium or steel framed one to 30km (a barely competitive race pace). Or wearing a hugo boss suit to a job interview for KPMG when you have no professional work experience whatsoever.

It's basically the mismatch between desiring the most powerful tools at the most amatuer level.

It's something we all feel. And perhaps the name is impatience. Funnily enough what is left behind is often what we deem 'art' those antiquated methods that get picked up and refined and perfected into something actually new, actually impressive, actually inspirational.

Instead of watching some fat guy in a leotard achieve world wide fame for posting his impersonation of Beyonce's 'All the Single Ladies' which is really quite crap, is there anyone out their compiling a book of what people managed to do with html script?

I had a resume in HTML, or at least that was how it appeared to Bryce when I sent it to him, he commented that you should be suspicious of anyone that uses HTML anymore. I believe it was some finugled version of html that my brother programmed for me while it was cutting edge. It did all the formatting for you no sweat no matter how much you fucked around with the contents.

A few years on and I think that although that resume was probably the very definition of uncool at the time, how much I like the retro aesthetic now of all the geocities pages that first populated the internet. Impossible to navigate, and the quality of information was totally unreliable.

Even though rationally I know there is far more content on the internet now than 10 years ago, it used to feel like a much bigger much less comprehensible world, thanks largely no doubt to lack of common standards, good search engines, and talent on part of the public.

But basically I dub this the retronet! and it was a refreshing deviation from searching for something and having wikipedia come up as the first search result.

Furthermore I was talking to my brother and he said all his old school friends that used to post on a outlook message board on 'The Wheel of Time' series aparantly still all have geocities style personal webpages.

Last thought on the retronet, the general tastelessness of MySpace pages, and the shitty content therein demonstrate that our means on the internet clearly extends beyond the grasp of a population that generally has nothing worthwhile to say.

myself included.