I recently had thoughts about what the future of the internet holds for old pieces of media. By now, you can see videos on YouTube that were published around a decade ago or longer. We can see this now and consider it old media, especially for the fact that the web has only been made public for around thirty years, so a decade old piece of media, right now is already as old as a third of that. The existential thought of the fate of these pieces of media lie in its relevancy from twenty or more years from now. Will people still be able to find these pieces of media, or will they become irrelevant or maybe even deleted to make room for future pieces of media?
Katie Wagner brings up an important fact in her article, 404 Page Not Found, that "the average website is less than ten years old..." This means that right now, we are lucky to even have websites that hold any piece of media for longer than ten years ago. It's very easy to not recognize this fact when we have very big websites such as, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and even Instagram all be over ten years old by now. Facebook being the oldest at twenty, but we can tell right now that Facebook has its problems, and that's not to say the others do as well but will start here first.
Facebook was one of the first social media sites to allow people to post and share with others on the web. Now I know I wasn't there during this time, but I have heard others always talk about the predecessor of Facebook, also known as Myspace. I know nobody uses Myspace anymore, but there is a valid reason as to why people still talk about it and Katie Wagner had the best word to describe it. Nostalgia. The sheer fact that people loved how creative and dumb they could get with their Myspace accounts. It was an era that allowed full creative freedom on the user side. But of course, in this capitalist world, Facebook would triumph over that due to its reach in audience. Businesses and "higher class" people loved the simple and sophisticated look of Facebook and other websites that would come after it. It was only natural that Facebook would last this long, as it was a great place to generate connections and more importantly money. That is why the media found on Facebook still exist over the ghost of more creative websites such as Myspace.
Now you might wonder, with the success these businesses have garner over the years, why they won't commit back to the creativeness of the old web era. That is due to apps. Our smartphones are the most used technology ever in our history so there is a pretty big market that's trying to advertise to us through our phones. The only problem with apps is, in the words of Katie Wagner, "apps, though they may be connected to the web, are not websites. As tech writer Christopher Mims noted in 2014, apps and app stores are all about throttling the competition; unlike the web they aren't built on a universal open platform. They are thus completely misaligned with the earlier ethos of the internet as a place for the open-ended exchange of ideas." Everyone is now building their websites through the constraints of our phones rather than our desktops. The desktop nowadays is an afterthought for any new company making a website or old companies updating their website. That is why we can't have total creative freedom, because our phones lack the capability to give that to us. But this of course will work great through a business's favor because it's less work for them. Unless their business is about making websites, but I digress.
All this might sound bleak in a creative standpoint for the future of the web, but this is the internet we're talking about and things change all the time. New formats and templates are always coming up to be the new trends that companies will still try to capitalize on. But we still have the power to create our own creative websites. Granted they won't stay up forever like others, and it is money out of your own pocket to do so, but that is what we have to work with still and it's a start. Some people make their websites to show of their work, or have their own discussions, and sooner or later we might cycle back to an improved version of the 1.0 version of the web. That is just how things will change with every cycle of new and old websites.