An article about the history and politics of the personal web from Olia Lialina, a pioneering web artist & geocities archivist. She identifies a shift from “my” to “me”, led by services like geocities, which changed the way people used the web for the worse…
The growing idea that things can belong to the person who wrote an html code, or scanned pictures, or collected something was unprofitable and dangerous. Today, users put a gate or a door on their page [Fig.47,48]. And what tomorrow? Will they start to think that the files behind them belong to them? And the day after tomorrow, will they come round to thinking hat their data should not be exposed or sold?
Today they change the colour of the scroll bar [Fig. 49,50] adapting it to the theme of their imaginary world, so what’s next? Will they come around to the idea of installing a browser extension, or write one!
Dangerous!
[…] Through the second part of the 90s, service providers took many actions to reduce and restrict: rewriting Terms of Service (ToS) and taking away frameworks, not developing tools that would make it easy to update and communicate – editors, guestbooks, or web rings; and developing tools and services that would (theoretically) require the least effort, simultaneously promoting the idea of IRL, of some real life that you were allegedly missing when making your web page.
But the smartest and most effective move the industry made (the aforementioned measures wouldn’t work without it) was to push people from My to Me. To introduce forms that would motivate people to see themselves as the main – and then the only – content of what they do online.