Updates soon. I'll be posting the social sites of the past I'm exploring through the internet archive, and the experiments I make to express what I've learned.
this is my research about the impact of Livejournal as a social website.
made some mental progress today! Talked to Angelo, Carlos, and Andrew about overshare: the documentary about Justin Hall's experience of the early web. They had some great input. Biggest takeaway from the film was how much super personal info Justin put out into the world. Only after search engines emerged, and people could search their names online, did people start to complain about their top search results being Justin's account of doing drugs/having sex/general NSW content with them. We decided that the parts to share with this new group should be :
after our meeting, I rewatched some of the doc too, and through a clip of Justin talking about being online, searched up this other 1995 documentary called Understanding The Internet. pretty dry in the beginning, but this funny canadian guy talks to an interesting handful of (all white and middle class...) people who are either founders of the system itself, or rapidly emerging entrepreneurs and authors on the internet. has some useful descriptions of how it works, why it was made initially, and funny portaits of the era, video of people experiencing the web, using email, using search applications, describing the internet in very physical terms. they all sound astounded by the potential power of what they're doing. "it will be terrifying"
at the end of the doc, they give a web address and instructions to go to it via your Mosaic web browser! I went to it in the web archive, checked out the earliest capture of the site, 3 years after the doc was published in 1998. Has some very of the era links to internet news items.
