
Saved by Dayna Carney
Before the Internet
Saved by Dayna Carney
The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.
The internet was not yet an enormous public stage, not yet the automatic place for people to share and overshare. Posting unpolished personal stuff felt weird.
Somewhere in the back of my mind is a dim memory of standing in some line holding a perforated card. I remember the cheap, slightly clinical feeling it gave me, and recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call me naive, but I seem to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and st
... See moreDuring the last half of the nineties, the Internet still felt highly segregated—to a mainstream consumer, it was hard to see the ideological relationship between limitless porn and fantasy football and Napster and the eradication of travel agents. What unified that diaspora was the rise of blogging, spawning what’s now recognized as the “voice” of
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