A Changing Internet
In Virginia Heffernan’s article “The Old Internet Neighborhoods”, she at one point describes a website that started to disappear:
“Last month, a once-popular eight-old-year British board about mental health went dark with a note: ‘The Internet has changed significantly.’”
That phrase, “The Internet has changed significantly”, really struck me. In our culture and in this day and age, technology changes faster and more often than one can imagine. As Heffernan described message boards, I began to think back to what the Internet used to be to me. It was used for AIM or group conversations in chat rooms, and finding games to play on random websites. Reminiscing now, it seems like AIM was ages ago, when in reality only six or seven years have passed since it was considered popular. Though I never used message boards, those were considered popular as well.
Today, however, people are more interested in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and sharing their ideas on blogs such as Tumblr. Rather than going onto a message board where one interacts with strangers with similar interests, people have started to shift toward a wider range and different approach to Internet interaction. Heffernan seems to believe that this change is killing message boards, and that message boards are becoming obsolete because of overpowering social sites. Are message boards really dying away, or have they just gone through an evolution to become the sites that we now know to be social media? Do you think that in seven years Twitter and Facebook will die away as well? Or will they become something new? Some might argue that Myspace has already died away. Although it could also be argued that Myspace has simply undergone an evolutional change, since it is now a strong resource for bands to get their music out. Thoughts?
