Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet

Compared with the fragmented, D.I.Y. Web I knew, social media felt strangely predictable. User profiles on new sites like LinkedIn or Flickr were templated and surrounded by ads. They offered preset options from categories and drop-down menus—age, location, institutional affiliation—and quantified influence through friend and follower counts. The n... See more

The show, released in 1998, centers on a teen-age girl named Lain who discovers a virtual realm called “the Wired,” which she accesses through an elaborate personal computer. The palette of the show is dark but soft; Lain is most often seen in her dimly lit bedroom at night, which reminded me of the basement nook that held the desktop in my own hom... See more

MySpace linked the digital geography of the Internet to the offscreen world in other ways. You connected your account to your friends’ accounts by “friending” them, building a map of your preëxisting IRL relationships, and the site prompted you to choose a “Top Friends” ranking of eight people whose names appeared first in the list. The feature bec... See more

Getting a job through compulsive tweeting marked my first exposure to the digital attention economy that was beginning to monopolize the Internet. I grasped a new formula: content = attention = followers = profit. Anything that made enough noise online could be monetized in one way or another. My online presence increasingly felt like a carefully c... See more

Mostly, though, I’ve had the sense that the Internet is in a state of limbo, suspended between the remains of an aging, broken system and the nebulous beginnings of a new one. One of the Internet’s best qualities remains that anyone can start over, at any time, with a blank Web site, and create whatever they want.

This commodification of the self accelerated with the advent of Instagram, which turned the visual trappings of our personal lives into fodder for the feed.

Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us al... See more