Internet nostalgia

I was adamant to join facebook.

I previously had joined hi-5 (interesting things were happening in my life, so I was in the mood to share with friends).

I was never interested in MySpace.

By the time I had an elaborate hi-5 page, with half a dozen photos, youtube links, posts, etcetera, I learnt from my brother (who is seven years younger than I) that hi-5 was being sort of phased-out, and that he, along with other friends, were moving to facebook.

My niece had already abandoned hi-5.

I'm starting to put some stuff on a facebook page, reluctantly, since I've been kind of pressured ('socially' pressured if you would) to build a facebook presence.

By the time I established my presence, I leart that my older brother was an enthusiast of the site. He already had dozens of 'friends', 'albums' (photo albums) and youtube links. He seldom 'posts' stuff, but appears to be adding new friends and music links.

Then there is my sister-in-law. She posts by the hour (or by the minute) and my younger brother seems to post most of the time from an iPhone. My niece keeps herself busy with teen discussions and popular culture discussions.

But I am not very enthusiastic about this tool. When thinking of the Internet, people tend to forget that the Internet is a myriad of tools: it is the browser (bien sûr), the world wide web, the email, the file transfers (to avoid an obscure term like file transfer protocol), the blogs, etcetera.

Facebook is just another tool of the Internet (it is not the Internet).

It could be that I am not much of a social person (and facebook is a social environement). Or it could be that I am getting old, and I long for the days when the Internet was something exciting and new to discover. Years ago there was a thing called Mosaic, developed by the National Science Foundation. At the moment I'm not able to confirm this, but Mosaic may have been the first available browser, and later evolved into Netscape.

Apple computers were called Macintosh and were the size of a small television set (only taller). These Macintosh and Mosaic were a state-of-the-art combination.

Though it wasn't long before I discovered amazon.com, the Internet of those days wasn't much of a commercial venture. It was largely confined to universities, and was a superb research tool. I remember having suscribed to a news service (OMRI) where they posted up to date news about Eastern Europe. If a demonstration had taken place in Bulgaria, with people flooding the streets of Sofia, I'd know it immediately the next day, before the headline made new on local (or international papers).

Communiqués were simple: just a header, a date stamp, a body of text (probably in courier type) and a dozen lines of text from onsite reporters. There wasn't anything fancy, you know, today's flash animations, sounds, videos.. Personally, I find the old communiqués better than today's news pages -which can be distracting.

Radio poscasts didn't exist in the early ninetees and I'm glad we have them today.

This is why I don't like facebook, this is why I never joined the Instant messaging wave. On the Internet there are other things than facebook, messenger or twitter.

I guess our usages of the Internet reflect who we are in the physical world. For someone who avoids small conversation, instant messaging may not be his (or her) cup of tea. Someone who has many friends and is "networked" (to loan a word from the business world) is more likely to have many friends on facebook.