GeoCities
The world changed when the Internet was invented. Nobody will ever debate that. There are fully grown adults today who have never known a world without it. The Internet has evolved into an essential part of life and an integrated realm which our lives revolve around. But there was a time when that wasn’t yet the case. That time was called… [dramatic pause] the 1990s.
One December morning in 2016, out of complete boredom, curiosity, and nostalgia, I embarked on a mission to create an original website that to the unknowing eye would seem like a completely authentic forgotten homepage from the late ‘90s. Taking all the worst elements of web design from the era along with 100% period-correct GIFs and real URLs (now dead links) sourced from archived webpages, I was able to create a fully bona fide website that would visually fool anyone into thinking it was a real abandoned personal homepage with a seemingly deceased webmaster; a digital relic forgotten in time and space.
Sporting all the correct bells and whistles of 1998 technology, it definitely looks and acts the part. But aside from its visual aspects and thoroughly researched content, what I really wanted to capture was the ethos of all personal homepages from that time period: one that really begged the question, "Why does this website exist?"
If you did find yourself thinking, “But why?” while you were scrolling through my website, I would answer, “Thank you.”
Before I embarked on this digital quest, I thought that this breed of websites was long dead. However, I was quite surprised to find that this exact same question ("Why?") can be asked of virtually anyone's personal social media presence today. Besides their self-congratulatory and ego-serving characteristics, what are the important and crucial reasons for the existence of these accounts? There's a certain element of narcissistic expression in a lot of these types of places that first manifested itself when the Internet began and only continues to grow stronger as the years roll on and the hit counters stop working. This project was a historic exploration of that.
Please visit the website and explore around! Sign my guestbook – and if it doesn’t work properly, let’s just pretend that was meant to be a feature and not a bug.
Best viewed on a desktop computer (naturally) using Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, or America Online, with an 800x600 screen resolution. (All kidding aside, use Safari. And keep Archive.org’s Wayback Machine by your side if you actually want to see all the dead links while they were still alive.)
Now, here’s the co-founder of Yahoo! talking with Bill Maher and Phil Hartman about this very topic in 1998...
