Kate Wagner's "404 Page Not Found" goes through her experience growing up with the internet and the effects its evolution has had on the public.
I was interested to see how Kate's opinions and experiences evolved alongside the Internet, growing from plain and simple websites to Google's new found dominance in the world of the Internet to the intense visuals of Myspace and the "rise of Facebook".
Kate went into detail about how she experienced each evolution of the Internet and how she felt it was going downhill. The glory of the Internet was the way that so much information, data, memories, and ideas could be so simply stored and collected for a seemingly infinite amount of time. However, the same way that it was simple to store and share all of these things it was just as easy to erase them forever. Kate expresses that "it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground" any time a website with a large audience and user population goes offline or offloads their mass amounts of data. So much material can be lost so easily.
Thankfully there are groups that are able to archive websites and their information for nostalgia’s sake. In 2005 a group including Olia Lialina went through and salvaged many of the 1990s Geocity websites that had been created by simple people using whatever design elements they had available to them at the time. These sites were about to be shut down forever, permanently deleting all of the history held within them. Lialina’s group started a movement of people going in and salvaging what they could from dying websites before they were lost to the ether, capturing all of the memories, styles, opinions, and images used during that period in time.
Kate spends a considerable amount of time writing about how much the style and feel of the Internet has changed as well. The early stages of the Internet, primarily the Myspace time period, was full of oversaturated, overwhelming websites handmade by amateur teenagers who were simply looking for a way to express themselves in this new digital world. The amount of care and detail that went into designing these sites and pages, not only on Myspace, to portray exactly what these teens wanted was much more heartfelt than how it is now. There were entire websites dedicated to showing tutorials on how kids could add more to their pages and customize every single little detail. Unfortunately in this day and age websites are designed to be the complete opposite. They are sleek and classy and consist of minimal color usage, simple and legible fonts, minimal imagery, no GIF’s, no glitter, no graphics, and mostly: no charm. During the rise of Facebook there was a large generational divide between the youth and the adults as the youth still preferred their intricate, detailed Myspace pages and the adults were very satisfied with the minimalism and simplicity of the newly rising Facebook where they too could post about their lives and their opinions just without the flare and detail of the old school Myspace. Aside from the divide between teens and adults, Facebook also catered towards more “honors kids” and ivy league students compared to the “ghetto” Myspace users, creating a divide between the youth as well.
Despite the modern day Internet being a place where anyone can find anything from anywhere at any given time there are many people out in the world that still appreciate the Internet's roots and understand how far it has come. Even if it is now an overwhelming and often negative place the Internet came from humble beginnings and should be appreciated by the masses.