8 Years at Hidden City
I don’t know how I missed it. I’ve been looking over sites that are in my feeds or bookmarks. Long ago, I had a link on an ancient version (maintained by editing flat files in php, no less) of this site with a big links list that included Hidden City. I’ve always enjoyed reading Marc Kevin Hall’s writing and somehow it’s a comfort to see that he’s still at it, posting his thoughts to the world.
He noted a week ago that he had recently celebrated the eighth anniversary of his website. He muses on how much the web has changed in those eight years.
Today, eight years later, the web has changed. It is far less of a creative frontier, with social codes determined by the pioneers and early settlers, a kind of virtual Deadwood. The citizens of the web are no longer primarily writers and artists, musicians and essayists, hackers and visionaries — the ‘netizens’ are just ordinary people consuming ordinary popular culture; the omnivorous corporations run the show, reducing us to mere demographic metrics, targeted consumers, or occasionally ‘content creators’ churning out snippets to fill the spaces between advertisements. The by-words are no longer community of individuals, but conformity to the masses. A new social networking site even uses the term ‘herd’ to describe its users. I cannot begin to describe how much despair that brings me.
I’m right there with you, sir. The upcoming new year will mark eight years of blogging here for me and Marc’s post brings the nostalgia back. It reminds me of Alison’s poignant letter to the internet of 2001 (previous mention here). With 850 million social networking sites, several billion people on MySpace, lolcats scattered everywhere, and Twitters flying in every direction of the compass, the internet seems more blessedly inclusive today. There is a certain amount of community that seems to have been lost, though.
I’m glad Marc’s still posting. Congratulations on eight years.
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