Internet culture

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The sorry state of the web

Christian Heilmann is an astute observer of the web and its evolution, so I pay attention. I have followed his blog for many years. I found myself nodding my head when reading this piece. The whole piece is worth a read. (link below).

The web we have these days is in a sorry state. On the one hand we have the “social web” firmly in the hand of marketeers, bots and political propaganda. On top of that drowning in memes, reposts and funny things you already read in newsgroups in 1998. On the other hand we have the publisher web after 25 years still not being able to embrace the concept that you can’t control the distribution of your content once it is online. On the social web, knowledge is smothered by agenda and on the publisher web by ads and paywalls and contracts. Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago? Back in library days you were able to do that. On news portals, most articles are deleted after a year, and on newspaper web sites you hardly ever get access to the archives – even with a subscription

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Nostalgia Internet doesn’t really matter

Nostalgia has come to the Internet, and it is too little, too late. Nostalgia is not what defines the future. Sub-10 year-olds won’t give a damn about the nostalgia-Internet. Unfortunately, that is why we see incumbents always miss the generational drift. Sure, I might use analog film, write with fountain pens and listen to long play records, but it doesn’t matter to the young ones in my family. They know what they are doing, even though still in early teens. And when my goddaughters grow up in a few years, they will be fully equipped to deal with information overload, influencer dichotomy and would be able to discern fake news. For them, it will be something new, something different. Just like it was for us. Another way to read this story — a certain cohort of Internet people including myself are getting old  (Photo by RawPixel via Unsplash)

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