Index—Sitemap—Tagmap—Updates

On Web Spaces

Created: 2025-06-25 (19:57:23) — Modified: 2025-12-27T20:22:00
Status: in progress

My website has been around online for years in several incarnations, under different names and hosts. Back when I was trying to become alternately an artist and a linguist, it used my real name. Its layout was minimalist, its images and text carefully curated.

Then those aspirations passed, or at least went dormant, and the website turned into a dumping ground for stray images and university papers and half-finished projects. Its layout fell apart, it decomposed into raw HTML, no CSS, although it still worked enough to navigate around the fragments. The domain name expired, then the hosting, and the whole tangled heap of it wound up on Neocities, more or less abandoned.

I thought that would be the end of it. Instead, I wound up becoming obsessed all over again, albeit this time with static sites, with personal blogs, digital gardens, galleries, webrings, guestbooks, shrines and idiosyncratic HTML. What changed? And why does engaging with all this come as such a relief, compared to using the rest of the internet?

Contents

Computer memories

For me, the early promise of the internet gets all tangled up with the early promise of personal computing in general. I grew up while hardware and software was still in its slightly experimental phase, and even though most of it was totally inaccessible to me at the time, it still shaped my expectations about what computers could do.

It might make more sense to talk about hardware and software and networking separately, or for that matter to keep my own subjective experiences separate from any attempt at theorising about the history of the web. I’m going to do neither of those things here.

Apple Macintosh

I still spend a lot of time thinking about the design of old computers, especially the ones Apple produced around the end of the millennium: iMacs and eMacs, Mac Minis and the early flat-screen models mounted to stands that looked like ostrich eggs. Early releases of Mac OS X.

I only ever actually owned a hand-me-down iMac, a chunky triangular model with a translucent cyan case. It had OS 9 and would not connect to the internet. It was not powerful enough to run much more than Kid Pix and a few multimedia CD-ROMs from the nineties.

But before this, my experience was limited to the school computer lab, a fraught environment run by a man with an explosive temper and the uncanny ability to imitate the calls of barnyard animals, and an ancient PC which didn’t even have an operating system installed, which booted into the BIOS, which I nonetheless spent a lot of time looking at, fascinated by its bright blue screen and abstract text, its shrill beeps.

So in comparison to that, my outdated iMac represented a radical expansion of possibilities. I spent a lot of time making janky animations using the slideshow function in Kid Pix, reading through a multimedia encyclopedia of animals of the world, attempting unsuccessfully to install The Sims and otherwise aimlessly mucking around in the settings.

At that age, it is almost satisfying enough to just hang around on the computer. I resonate with recollections from other writers. Em Reed on rummaging around in directories:

To begin with they were tucked away in file folders and menus that also felt like a sort of castle with secret trapdoors and hidden dungeons to find. I found the tricks of sorting and searching, messing with a file by changing its extension, and rummaging through the file structure of my CD-ROM games and hidden hard drive folders, and was VERY lucky I did not permanently break anything important.

Stephen Gillmurphy on “using the computer” as an end in itself:

no point to any of this other than to record that, for me at least, the purpose of a computer was less visible than the series of affordances it offered, and the process of slowly assembling those affordances into semi-coherent directed processes–into “using” the computer–was a sort of piecemeal and provisional one, driven maybe less by any specific desire to do a thing than by just slowly building up a picture of what processes led into each other, which formed satisfying loops, could be closed and repeated.

Candle on their early creative works, lost forever:

the world map in mario excited me: video game zones existing in a real space and not just vanishing when you complete them. i used the paint program to imagine my own mario heaven and hell worlds. these images are the lost files i miss the most.

I suspect my own iMac may still be around, entombed within a carcinogenic caravan at my childhood home. Should I ever brave the clutter, the stagnant air, the asbestos, and should it still boot, I may yet regain access to my earliest digital works.

If this outdated iMac represented for me an expansion of possibilities, the newer generation models stocked by the university reseller represented something well beyond that. The reseller was in a dimly lit building, supervised by one indifferent student, and usually we were the only people in there. It resembled a museum, and the computers, displaying pulsing-light screensavers, seemed as remote, as valuable, as any museum piece.

So apart from one janky machine, these computers formed an imaginative rather than concrete part of my life, and made a more lasting impression for that reason. Flat-screened iMacs with stands that looked like ostrich eggs, and brushed-metal user interfaces, signified maximally frictionless computing. These were machines that could accomplish anything.

Cheap laptops

Pure facade. Apple spent a lot of money marketing its products in exactly this way, as hermetically sealed, beautiful boxes of potential. My later experiences using them in labs and university libraries took the shine off. They were pretty, but also pretty fucking frustrating to actually use.

By that point I had spent a decade working instead on cheap laptops. A low-specification Compaq preinstalled with Windows Vista, an operating system so dysfunctional it forced me to install and learn a Linux distribution instead, to work with the terminal emulator, with the package manager, with an unsupported wireless card, with emulation.

Its successor, a Dell, worked better and reliably got me through the end of high school and six years of university. It did not itself die, its power adaptor stopped working, and by that point it had held on for over a decade and there were no replacements available.

If at the outset, I had started on a computer that just worked and not something needing constant negotiation, I might not have stepped backwards into electronic fiction, net art, permutational poetry, site building and all the other niche passions that developed out of the necessity of climbing into misbehaving machines and trying to fix them. Engaging with computers as something more than a nice case and a nice interface, which might have been all that those museum-piece iMacs ever offered, in contrast.

Apple pretty quickly switched from white plastic to burnished metal. Instead of locating the computer circuitry in a cute rounded base they stuck it behind the monitor. Apple desktops now look like counterpoise lamps, nice enough but uninspiring. I’ve never looked at a lamp and got excited about its affordances, about everything it could light up.

And computers, regardless of their form-factor or manufacturer, have largely converged on the same aesthetic at this point. Hermetic. Minimal. Monochrome. For me, thinking about the potential of computers still calls up instead memories of experimental, not-entirely-codified hardware, decades forgotten by now, which I never owned and never will.

Web 1.5

Neocities feels like a holdout or throwback to a more spatial way to engage with the web. I’m not sure if there is a better term for it–spatial web seems to be used now to an unholy convergence of artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency and the internet-of-things, which is definitely not my intended use–so if nothing else we may have to find a different term.

It is the experience of navigating from site to site, landmark to landmark, rather than using a search engine or visiting an aggregator or feed. There is technically a feed on Neocities, mostly made up of site updates but also where people can post comments. But the feed is ancillary to the primary experience of navigating around the sites themselves, moving up and down webrings, or through and out of cool links pages, all the while bookmarking the interesting ones to revisit.

Neocities calls back to GeoCities and this older mode of navigation, with an emphasis on user-made sites, and on these sites functioning as spaces in a pretty literal way, as things which individuals build, renovate and frequently tear down and start over again. GeoCities took it further than this. User sites were addressable locations within pseudo-geographic regions, like Bourbon Street, Sunset Boulevard and Tokyo.

The idea being that communities could form around shared interests, for example, “jazz, Cajun food and culture, along with a healthy dose of Southern hospitality” (Bourbon Street), “parenting, pets and home town values” (Heartland), or “all things about and from the Far East” (Tokyo). A game: visit the Web Design Museum exhibit on GeoCities Neighborhoods and try to guess what kinds of topics coalesce around which regions.

I wonder how strict the moderation for these communities was, how quickly you might get booted out for setting up a shrine to the jazz saxophone in the middle of Wall Street, “where GeoCitizens do business,” or for talking about manga in Paris, home of “poetry, arts, fine wine and continental lifestyle.”

The early internet as whole depended on spatial metaphors, both in terms of the way it was sold–as an information superhighway–and in how you actually navigated between sites and engaging in online communities. I got online somewhere in the middle of the transition away from chat rooms, forums, and personal pages hosted on Angelfire and GeoCities, to centralised social media and the feed.

I was too late for BBS, MUDs and MOOs, but still in time to enjoy dial-up and MSN Messenger, and waste our limited bandwidth on Neopets and Runescape, on the DeviantArt and ConceptArt forums, and to get in early on Instagram and Tumblr, and the rest of that terrible set before they went and ruined all the fun.

Dial-up

My family first got online around 2002. I think broadband internet was gaining traction by that point, but for the first couple years we connected through a dial-up model. This might well have still been the norm, given the long-shoddiness of Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure.

Topics for future reflection, even some of them are played-out by now: the screeching dial-up tone, wrestling with our faulty DSL port, and having to physically relocate our first broadband modem from room to room, computer to computer, since it offered only an ethernet connection… how did we cope?

Our plan offered 400 megabytes a month, after which you had to pay by the megabyte. We initially only had the family computer. Our engagement with the web was necessarily very limited, but patterns of use were quickly settled: I tended to log on during the afternoons to play Neopets and read about Pokémon, after which my sister kicked me off to use it well into the night. I think she mostly messaged her friends on MSN Messenger, but she could have been doing anything on there. I assume our parents used it, too, when we were out.

See also

References

Endmatter

Tags: @in-progress @reflections @web

Return to: Ormulum