love letter to the web

Homer Simpson: "and a new invention called the Internet let the whole world read what some nerd thought about Star Trek."

Or something like that, anyway. Strangely enough, I can't find the original quote anywhere on the Internet...you'd think that would be almost as easy as finding out what some nerd thinks about Star Trek.

When I jumped on board the World Wide Web, it was back in the days before the first big bubble burst. The mid 1990s, when 56k dial-up was pretty much the limit (unless you had a T1 connection). Forget about streaming audio and video; a jpeg file at any respectable resolution took forever to load, and a song could take all night to download. Most sites were text-only, and only the biggest nerds and the biggest cranks had their own webpage.

And I miss that. It was definitely more fun to find kindred spirits among the mere hundred thousand misfits...not that I actually made much contact. "Social Networking" had yet to become a buzz phrase...in fact, "Instant Messaging" was still a ways off. Stuff like IRC was about the only game in town at that point. However, I was more of a spectator than a participator...either because I didn't have much more to offer...or just maybe because those who did seemed even geekier than me :)

Now the Internet seems like nothing more than the world's biggest airline magazine. Full of gimmicky shopping and half-assed journalism, disposably helpful "how-to's" and endless lists of someone else's favorite inconsequentials. Glossy, instantly interactive, packed with all sorts of little screens and menus and buttons and designer style. A far cry from the simple, ugly, and often barely-working pages of that ancient era.

It's better in every way, and I'm less in love with it with each passing day.

Which is just as well...only a real nerd falls in love with the internet, then or now.

But like an ex-girlfriend who just gets hotter, I both miss the old internet and resent the new one for being so damn popular and successful...while I just kept being the same old nerd. Maybe the internet will come back to me when everyone else is tired of it :D