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Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

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Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#141

Post by dredmorbius »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #47
alt227 wrote: post #10

When I pause Netflix, why dont I have the option to purchase the clothes they are wearing on screen?

Why don’t I even have the option to have friends on Netflix and make lists of movies I watch that I think they would like?

This has been tried ... numerous times. I recall a brief-lived CBS Interactive site / app in the late aughts. Went nowhere.

Most such interaction now occurs within extant social groups. Much as you'd watch a TV show or go to a theatre with friends, most people now discuss films on their self-centric social media. FB / Instagram / Reddit / Twitter, etc., usually with at least some people they know directly.

Conversing with absolute strangers has far less appeal.

Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#142

Post by unity1001 »

enos_feedler wrote: post #109

It's amazing just how quickly you can catch the under estimation of the internet's potential. Within the first sentence, starting with the word "imagine", the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline, rather than creating and sharing it within the internet itself. In the furthest stretches of the imagination, the prediction still falls very short. No criticism to anyone in 19…

> the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline

Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as being 'caring for their customers'. That was it. The extent of users' say in anything.

Early Internet still reflected that world order. It was a one way street in which the people consumed what the corporations produced. There weren't even comment forms under any article in any prominent publication. After all, who are you, a lowly pleb, to comment under an article in which a glorious, 6-figure columnist from the 'right background' wrote. Know your place.

User-generated content lived in the fringes of the Internet in those days. It was the plebs' place. The unwashed.

Then comes blogging. Social media. User-generated content starts to dominate and becomes de-facto content. Everything turns upside down. We are living in its aftermath, in which its even hard to imagine how one-way the early Internet was.

Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#144

Post by euroderf »

ck2 wrote: post #90

For some reason this made me flashback to the summer of 1981 when MTV first went on the air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs Spot the mainframe cabinet and wait for the full wall Moog (they actually showed non-stop videos back then, it was awesome, nothing like it before)

They went like the first two or three years without commercials. Hard to believe now.

Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#145

Post by kurthr »

unity1001 wrote: post #142
enos_feedler wrote: post #109

It's amazing just how quickly you can catch the under estimation of the internet's potential. Within the first sentence, starting with the word "imagine", the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline, rather than creating and sharing it within the internet itself. In the furthest stretches of the imagination, the prediction still falls very short. No criticism to anyone in 19…

> the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as be…

I hear "knew their place" and all I can think of is that they knew they were watching ads... now many people think that all their content is free (like information wants to be ;^) not realizing they are are the product being sold.

It's not like tiktok/Insta or the news/blog promotional articles are anything but ads... people just don't "know their place" any more.

Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#147

Post by axus »

unity1001 wrote: post #142
enos_feedler wrote: post #109

It's amazing just how quickly you can catch the under estimation of the internet's potential. Within the first sentence, starting with the word "imagine", the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline, rather than creating and sharing it within the internet itself. In the furthest stretches of the imagination, the prediction still falls very short. No criticism to anyone in 19…

> the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as be…

GeoCities started taking off in early 1996, at the same time NYTimes.com started publishing. Of course there was AOL and personal webpages before that.

Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#148

Post by justinlloyd »

Steltek wrote: post #33
mr_sturd wrote: post #21

Port explicitly specified in at least one URL. Was HTTP without a standard port back in '94?

I figured that it was someone's idea to get above the 1024 mark when all they had was a shell account and people weren't using :8080 yet. It could also be that "virtual hosting by name" wasn't a thing yet so a single computer hosting multiple sites had to break it out by port.

That is correct, there was no way to have multiple hosts on the same machine. One of the start-ups I helped build (engineer #2) in early 1997 (which still exists today in some form that many young, single men have spent quality time alone with) had a landing page, so that if your browser did not provide the host header, it would give you an index page of all the salacious sub websites/sub-domains available that you could then click on - it was an image map, naturally. We were very careful to keep the heterosexual and the homosexual offerings on physically separated servers so that customers did not complain about "accidentally" clicking on content that they didn't want to see. Latest versions of Netscape at the time supported the host header, but Internet Explorer very explicitly did not. And IE was the default for many people just getting online for the first time outside of AOL/Compuserve.

Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#149

Post by justinlloyd »

I watched this live when it first aired. My Miracom 9600 being my gateway drug to Usenet, Gopher, IRC, and the warez scene I was a part of.

How far we have come. The future will be interesting and exciting, if we can get past this current hump of monolithic "controlled experiences" that Facebook/Meta/Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc want to push on us.

Re: Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

#150

Post by justinlloyd »

poszlem wrote: post #36

Kind of makes me wonder what would those people say if we played them Bo Burnham's Welcome to The Internet from 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU

I aspire to having a video wherein I am wearing slippers that has had 90 million views. I think I have a new way that I will define success.
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