- You know internet comes of age. You wasn’t even born … something like 30 years ago …
- And how was it at the beginning ?
- Oh God ! It was a real mess ! And so much fun ! You know it was going through telephone lines ! Well something that doesn’t exist anymore by the way … It was so slow and so amateur-like ! Firstly managed by geeks only upon computer stuffs, gaming but also some scientific matters … It was taking hours just to upload a little picture … And it was a real job to find out information through miles of sites … The Information Highway, they used to call it … It was much more like crawling into a kind of sparkling, flickering desert !
- Through telephone ? But you didn’t need a computer to surf ?
- Off course ! We had computers ! Well not as powerful as today ! First of all, at the beginning we did not even have laptops … Wasn’t a matter anyway ‘cose wireless connections and so on did not exist, you could only plug in at the office or sometimes at home … You see Internet used to be very expensive …
- Did you already had hyperbrowsers and semantic 4-dimension search engines ?
- Oh no ! The very first search engines were so static ! And you had so many ! The even invented search engines searching through other search engines, some kind of a perpetual movement ! they were all going everywhere and nowhere at the same time ! Not like the universal portal we have now … You see all these companies merging creating this only way through Internet which provides writing, publishing, calculating, scheduling and surfing tools all at once … You had the choice at that time between navigators, programs … Because people used to write at that time too, now, they only send pictures and home made movies …
- Writing about what ? Their life ?
- Yeah ! People used to write about every topics and the very first one : themselves !
- What that means ? People used to tell about their own life ?
- Yes my son ! Their life, their habits, their hobbies, their concerns too … Their travels … They were proceeding so through blogs !
- Blogs ?
- Yes, in fact “Web Log Book” known as blog … B-L-O-G ! You see, far before the Internet and even the computer, people used to write about their life and what they were doing into personal white books, just to keep traces of their life … They even had paper photo albums ..
- And if I type “blog” , I may find them ?
- Well … Errrr … Don’t think you’ll find many of them left … Most of them, dealing with some kind of local or worldwide pieces of information turned into professional sites and the millions of real personal blogs shut down one by one …
- Why that ?
- Pretty complicated in fact … First, most of this people did believe they would reach some kind of “fame” on Internet, but very few succeeded … Because, at the very beginning, it was pretty easy to get known through social networking, through some buzz too … But as the blogs got democratized, as the number of blogging platforms grew incredibly high, it was more and more difficult to overcome from the crowd … And also, people realized that finally their own little life was no big deal and that, finally, they did not have much to say. So usually after few months, they were abandoning their blogs … And the blogosphere, as they used to call it, became a huge cemetery of drop-out words and pictures …
- I do not understand why they were willing to have a blog if to stop it so quickly ?
- Because at that time, it was the age of the image ! You know people thought that you had to build yourself a public image just to exist … Life was not enough, “fame”, star system, that was what the youth was willing to reach ! Well because, they were a little bit polluted by media and specially TV …
- TV ?
- TV was the greatest means for entertainment and culture at that time, kind of a movie box with special programs about news, education … And at that time most everybody thought that they had to pass on TV to be known. And as everybody couldn’t pass on TV, they tried to pass on the Internet …
- I don’t get that “fame” concept …
- Totally obsolete today boy ! But in this society, you had everybody much unknown except from family and relatives and you had very few people very well known as comedians, politicians, sportsmen … And some people doing extraordinary things … But everybody wanted to be famous ! Everybody wanted to be part of it ! To be on the big screen, because they were told so !
- And you had a blog too ? You wanted to be famous !
- Oh oh ! Yes I had a blog, not that I wanted to be that famous, but just because it was a very easy way to tell around what I wanted to tell … Or just to show what I liked …
- But you don’t any more ?
- Well you see, as you grew old, as you got an overwhelming job, as you raise a family … Well you don’t have much time left to do this kind of … amusement … And it is out of date anyway …
- Sounds funny anyway ! I’d like to read some of those blogs !
- If you search well, you may find some dead blogs left, they have not been all erased from servers … But do quickly !
- But do you know some blogs still active ? Is there still somebody writing blogs ?
- Of course there are still some bloggers ! Pretty hard to find, you’ve got to dig into the Unternet, far beneath the official layers of the Uppernet. And in the middle of the derelict virtual structures of the Freespace, you’ll find some community blogs, some art or poetry blogs … And if your clever enough, you may find the Graal ! Because it is no longer referenced anywhere, maybe, you’ll be lucky enough to trace the URL address of the very last blog …
- Really ? What does it talk about ?
- Nothing in particular … He or she, because no one knows, writes everyday about his/her real life as nobody but it is turned as if it was everybody’s life … It is a little bit nostalgic, but with no reactionary feelings or retrograde claim, just that it shows part of old culture as music, movies and arts … What is really strage is that this person doesn't seem at all to be part of the technology business or even world ... Looks like he is publishing from a far remote place, maybe even the countryside ... But hurry up too, ‘cose the blog exists for years and it may stop one day. At least the day its writer stops. For any reason, even a natural one.
