Once in a while, I find myself recalling certain aspects of the world wide web that are no longer in existence. It’s not that I wish these were still available today, but they often bring back memories that are just pleasant to pull out from the back of my mind. I am clearly too young to have been around when the Internet first emerged and miraculously changed our lives forever. There had been many corners of the Internet which preceded my existence on Earth, and naturally I can only be nostalgic about the stuff that co-existed with me. If these things I’m talking about in this post can’t compete with your Internet nostalgia in terms of antiquity, please don’t ridicule my lack of “worldliness”. I find it funny how sometimes older generations almost revel in the knowledge of certain things from the past that isn’t shared by later comers (e.g., the comment section of videos like this one). These are those who marvel (but with a tinge of pomposity) when young people don’t understand the “struggle” of using technology in the past compared to now, as if somehow that lack of familiarity reflects their lack of intelligence or even their poor character(?!). In reality, there is no superiority associated with having seen/used more extinct items or “having it harder” due to the circumstances of your time. We don’t tolerate generational shaming here on this blog. So, with the idea that all nostalgia is equally valid, let’s move on to all the things that I personally remember about my past on this weird space called the Internet.
MSN / AOL / Yahoo! Messenger chatroom type
I mostly used Yahoo! Messenger when I was an adolescent. I remember experiencing so much joy whenever I logged into my account and watched the gray sleeping face come alive into the classic smiley face that seemed to welcome me back to any conversations I had missed. Even just sitting around and noticing my contacts go online and offline in the corner of the screen was already some form of entertainment back then. I also loved playing around with the “invisible” status function, perhaps to get the attention of my crushes because I knew they would see my name pop up discretely on their screen. Pings, buzzes, and other ways to surprise people into a conversation were perhaps abused a tad bit too often by me and my friends, but we always had fun with these little tools. Using Yahoo! Messenger was also my first experience with emoticons (or simply “smileys”), and that would be the next thing on this list:
Animated emoticons and memorizing how to type them out
One of the most silly yet fulfilling things I had to memorize back then was the full list of emoticons used in Yahoo! Messenger. Each of these smileys would appear when we typed a specific set of symbols that correlated with how that smiley appeared. This clearly useful knowledge is no longer with me now, but it still amazes me how these smileys can convey such a range of emotions and messages that just one face already adds so much to an on-screen conversation. The fact that they were moving also spiced up every chat and make the convo less dull somehow.
Personal blogs like Yahoo! 360 or Blogspot or LiveJournal
Technically Blogspot is still alive today, and so are a myriad of other websites with similar functions (like WordPress). Yahoo! 360° (Plus) held a special place in my heart though (and I’d say the same for many other Vietnamese), and it was very much the first “facebook” before Facebook came into existence. I spent so many hours customizing and polishing my personal page, using extremely corny color palettes to showcase my individuality. There was also the option to generate my own personalized avatar, which amplified this notion of having an “alter ego” on the Internet. I have Yahoo! 360° and Blogspot to thank for initiating my love for blogging and for the existence of this blog right here.
Fandom forums
This was another big era of my adolescence. I mentioned in another blog post that I used to be active on a few forums when I was in middle school, and my involvement was under a fake identity I created for myself to seem older and more mature than I actually was. Specifically, I had first been introduced to fandom forum culture via two popular websites in Vietnam: DienAnh.Net (all things movies) and YAN.VN (the equivalent for music). Later on, I was a part of the Harry Potter fan club in my country (Harry Potter Vietnam Network) and also joined the fandom of some Disney Channel celebrities like Miley Cyrus and the High School Musical cast. All of these snippets made up such a major part of my early teenage years that I would never dismiss because I learned so much from all the interactions with my online friends, and from navigating these digital spaces to eventually adopt several media skills that still prove useful to me today.
Online games on Facebook, especially Playfish
Who knows how many hours I spent on my pet, my restaurant, my hotel, my empire, and my planets. These Playfish games were possibly my favorite part of the website (besides all the personality quizzes my friends and I constantly invited one another to try out). When these games turned defunct, I felt like a part of my youth just sank as well. I could imagine myself still playing at least one of these today if they still existed, but now I can only look back and reminisce over all the game sessions that lasted from after school all the way to past midnight. And hey, if one day I’m endowed with the task of running a restaurant or a hotel or an empire, maybe my game skills can be of use!
These are just some of my favorite parts of the Internet from earlier times. The Internet is still expanding, now at a much faster pace than before, and we are also cycling through trends of the Internet more quickly. With such growth and transformation, more things will inevitably slip through our fingers and turn dormant when the demand for them goes down with time. Committing the meaningful pieces of my past and present to memory (especially in this sort of written reflection on a blog) allows me to celebrate these valuable artifacts even when things are gone. What about you? What corners of the Internet did you use to frequent and what did they mean to you?
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