I CAN鈥橳 remember the exact moment I first used the internet, but as it would have been the late 90s, I would have called it the Internet with a capital 鈥淚鈥�. I surfed the information superhighway, merrily mixing metaphors as I explored this strange realm. I even had a printed book suggesting cool websites to check out, like The Really Big Button That Doesn鈥檛 Do Anything.
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I am slightly older than Marie Le Conte, who has written a book that is part personal memoir, part eulogy to the web that was, but we share the experience of growing up online. Reading Escape: How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet, I was surprised by just how similar our online teenage lives were.
Like Le Conte, I would come home from school, log on to the chat program MSN Messenger and spend the evening talking to friends I had just spent the whole day with. We also both had blogs, in which we freely shared details of our teenage lives without thinking about who was going to read them.
Essentially, the internet Le Conte and I occupied was small. Yes, you could theoretically connect to millions of people, but people tended to organise themselves into small communities around blogs, forums and other online hangouts. In fact my blog, a group blog, acted as a community for school friends and random people I met online.
Le Conte鈥檚 thesis is that, with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the fact that many more people now use the internet, something special has been lost. 鈥淲e found a home then it was invaded; it was no one鈥檚 fault, not really, but now everyone is here and our home is gone,鈥� she writes.
I think you really have to be from the same generation as Le Conte and me to appreciate this shift, and perhaps to get the most out of Escape. While it sits nicely on the shelf with Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, a fantastic exploration of how the online world has transformed language, that book is very much about the internet now, rather than Escape鈥榮 examination of the internet that was. And despite Le Conte鈥檚 best efforts, there is something about the early internet that means, like its 1990s contemporary The Matrix, you can鈥檛 be told what it is 鈥� you had to see it for yourself.
Le Conte also explores some of the issues arising from everyone now being online. There is a famous cartoon, published in The New Yorker in 1993, captioned 鈥淥n the Internet, nobody knows you鈥檙e a dog鈥�. It was true: online you could be anyone you wanted to be, adopting different personas as you flitted between communities.
Today, it is possible for your tweets to be read by your best friend from school, your parents and your boss 鈥� not to mention angry people you have never met. It is no surprise that things get taken out of context, a phenomenon known as context collapse. Le Conte calls this the Opera Singer Conundrum, after she tweeted a complaint about her opera singer neighbour who practised loudly 鈥� and got barraged by messages from other opera singers defending her neighbour.
Is it possible to reclaim the older, friendlier internet? Le Conte thinks so. In 2020, she created a private Twitter account to allow her to address a much smaller group. It is a trend that Twitter itself seems to be embracing 鈥� it has just launched a function that lets you restrict tweets to a select circle of 150 followers.
Perhaps we could all do with taking a page out of Le Conte鈥檚 book, and retreat into the quieter corners of the internet once more.
