© unknown

This was originally going to be yet another “Meet My Flatmates” post but I got too caught up in nostalgic ramblings. My new flatmate Michi and I often end up in the kitchen talking till 5am, topics ranging from the philosophy of life to zoophilia, and last weekend we realised we have a lot more in common than we initially thought. We both grew into the internet the same way.

When I bought this domain at the age of 14 I was quite active in the whole teenage web design scene. To publish yourself back then you had to make an effort and that’s what it was all about. I’ve seen so much amazing talent in so very young people with great skills and an impressive sense of aesthetics. We actually did amazing shit with Photoshop, HTML, CSS and PHP, from small iframe designs to big blog layouts, we connected over our love for these things, looked up to our web design heroes, chatted the nights away on MSN messenger and spent hours talking about designs, coding and our favourite music on various online forums. We lived in our own worlds, yet it seemed all somewhat useful. We were doing something real.

It’s hard to explain this to people who spent their (online) youth differently or people who grew into the internet with Blogspot and Tumblr. The internet is constantly evolving and adapting to the people’s needs – while back in the days, publishing yourself online was already a big deal, it’s something everybody can do nowadays. It’s not about the skills you have anymore, it’s about what and how you share. Facebook now allows you to tell the world if you gave birth, moved or simply broke a bone, even giving you an option to upload photos with it and tag locations and friends who witnessed the whole “life event”. Your personal info will soon look like a CV, making your profile a documentation of your life in a timeline format.

While you come across a lot of controversy concerning the evolution of Facebook, the internet itself and the whole social web, it’s more of a natural thing to me, a natural response to our needs. We want to share, we want to overshare, we’re all voyeurs and want to watch, it’s a part of us and society is adapting to that. I haven’t been anonymous online in years and I got used to it, it’s a part of me. I still enjoy making websites and still enjoy looking at my old design – it brings back all the memories of what it was like to be online back then and trying not to sound too pathetic, it makes me realise, I’m getting old.