The distant echo of faraway voices

[venta]

When writing last week's BAYD post, I did what I always do: put up an mp3 (of Try This At Home) for download. Later on, when I wanted to refer in passing to Reasons Not To Be An Idiot, I just linked to YouTube.

And then I thought: why do I do that? Why don't I just link to YouTube for my BAYD posts? Unless it's something really quite obscure, it'll be there. Do people care that much about downloading an mp3?

And then I thought: er... good question. The answer surprised me. I first started BAYD as a regular thing at the beginning 2005. At that point, YouTube didn't exist.

The domain name wasn't registered until February 2005 (the first video was uploaded by one of the founders in April, it went into public beta in May and was officially launched in November).

I went to university in 1994; I remember in one of the interminable induction sessions someone asked if the college computer services included "e-mail". At the time, I didn't know what it was. But I had an email account by the end of the term.

My college's computers were text-only dumb terminals; my first experiences of the web were through Lynx. Recently, clearing out bags of old university paperwork I found a tiny scrap of paper. On it, in my friend Andrew's overly-neat, school-book writing, it said:

http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu

... he'd written it down for me, and explained the concept of a search engine, and suddenly I could find stuff. Admittedly, the stuff I could find was not always related to what I searched for, and was frequently porn, but stuff none the less.

The web of the mid-90s was an odd place, and achieving anything at all often felt like a miracle. But finding things was so exciting... finding other people with the same interests (there was, like, a whole mailing list of other people, all over the world, who liked New Model Army!) Finding odd, fascinating pages written by who-knew-who, finding MUDs and - even then - lost archives of long-dead conversations.

But by 2005? The world was a different place then. The internet was no longer a mysterious kingdom, but a well-mapped, mainstream area. We had Google[*], and FireFox, and Wikipedia... pretty much like it is now, right? Only without the annoying Flash and AJAX?

It really surprised me to find out that YouTube just wasn't an option. I link to it so frequently, without thinking, that it now seems faintly unimaginable that it arrived so late in the day.

By contrast, I'm surprised to find that Facebook was already around in 2005 (though I'm quite sure it hadn't impinged on my consciousness). I still think of Facebook and Twitter as the johnny-come-latelies of the web. Mind you, I also think of them as almost entirely dispensable :)

The BBC news site had a fascinating graph the other day, showing use of its services over time (with the x-axis marked with 'notable' events). They reckon UK internet use hit 30m in 2002 - so by 2005, well over half the country was online.

If I'd gone to university four years earlier, I might have graduated and moved on without really encountering the internet until it became un-ignorable. Four years later, and I'd have missed the party and perhaps never really known a Google-free online world.

[*] The day I first encountered Google (courtesy of bateleur) was a revelation. It just, like, found stuff. That was relevant. Quickly.

Comments

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

I definitely remember going round to someone's house after clubbing and being amazed that you could just watch any music video you wanted on the computer. 2005 sounds about right. Oddly it's probably harder to do that now than it was then, at least not without being subjected to loads of adverts.