Bix dot Blog

One thing Lizzie O’Shea might be misconstruing is that back in the web’s crude, ugly days, one’s own presence on the internet tended to be more personal—whether through one’s own homepage or “just” through profiles you needed to fill out on early social networks (as opposed to later social media platforms, which are different) like Friendster. One tended to have some sort of “home” through which you described and defined your persona or personality. While there was no mythical “single collective experience” what we did have—and this is significantly what Joanne McNeil’s book was about—was an internet of people rather than an internet of users. So, I wonder if O’Shea isn’t mistaking being able to look back at the past internet and see people for being able to look back and see public space in the way in which she conceives of it. It was never public space in that sense, but it was a peopled space. In a very real sense, and one that runs against the grain of O’Shea’s argument, the move toward mass platforms—closer to, not farther away from, the “single collective experience” O’Shea mythologizes—in fact depersonalized cyberspace.