theoldinternet - Tumblr blog

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Fox Kids (UK) Children’s TV Channel (1996-2005) Teletext, via

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Interlude for the Apple II, 1980.

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Burning CDs How to page, unknown date.

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Here is the TEXT POPUP for FutureCulture:

From: ahawks (perpetually living) Subject: Returned Life: Purpose Unknown Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 10:34:49 MST

Here Fido, fetch - go long - yeah, real long - by the highway....

oops....

poor Fido, got run over on the Internet....

i just felt like sharing this....i hate fidonet.....

stupid thing, especially their postal system....you actually have to follow-up to returned-mail vie e-mail to figure out what the problem is, it's like Deliverance on the net.....

it's not automatic for the people, like the rest of returned mail is, you get the necessary info like that <snap>, but with fido you have to go to a buford shack out in the backwoods that has a bunch of rusty old cars out front, a dog missing a leg, 3 triplets named "Jeb" all missing some teeth, and grandma is sitting on the tattered couch in the front lawn peeing in her sleep.....uncle bob is sitting in the lawnchair trying to burp the national anthem and boasts "ya know, it still means somethin to me. always get a tear in my eye", and then stands up and salutes the ripped-up flag that is protruding from the homemade chimney. and now it's 2:30 in the afternoon and Suzie pulls up riding the back of Junior's crappy bike, the loudest thing on earth, with brown smoke making a breadcrumb trail, and she's obviously drunk and hasn't showered in at least 4 days, and she's waving her "Cat" hat around in the air and then falls off the bike, and for the first time you notice the Grafix bong sticker on the front of Junior's motorcycle helmet, and as he takes off the helmet he's grabbing Suzie's breasts like a robot. Uncle Bob looks over, burps, mutters "wench" out of the corner of his mouth, and reaches over his undershirt and the nasty protruding pale flesh of his stomach to switch the channel to a fishing show that he never messes "cuz those guys know fishin!!!". Junior and Suzie are laughing hysterically because life is beyond having no meaning for them, and they stomp off through the creaky half-assed screen door to a back bedroom in the "house".

the dog is busy carrying it's own shit in it's mouth down to the creek.

that's the creek where "city folk go and don't come back". there's blood on the smooth grey rock by the decaying oak tree.

and the whole thing smells heavily of methane, home brew, and dried bark, with just a pinch of stale urine.

cuz they know fishin!

haven't lived until your unfit overalls on one shoulder are filled with grease.

deliverance.

the irony.

fidonet sucks.

i think grandma just passed on, but we won't know for a couple daze.

[excerpt from FutureCulture FAQ (part 3)]

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Geocities Advertisement in Yahoo Internet Lite Magazine, May 1997.

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Beyond important!!!!!!

Survey Results: Fan Platform Use over Time

Particularly for those who were kind enough to participate in our survey last week, or to share it even after we halted data collection (because we received so many responses so quickly!), I wanted to give you something interesting right away. As you know, the academic writing and publishing process can be lengthy, so who knows when you might get a full paper from us! But in the meantime, this was the analysis I did this weekend.

The survey asked for participants to indicate what platforms they use/used from a given list, and also to indicate a date range (e.g., Tumblr 2006-2018). I parsed those date ranges in order to determine for a given platform how many of our participants were active in a given year. (This actually gave me an excuse to write some code for the first time in years. Jupyter Notebooks are super cool.)

(Click on the image above for full resolution!)

The Y axis is number of survey participants who indicated using the platform during a given time, and the X axis is year. (This starts at 1990, though I’ll note there were 10-ish participants who indicated using usenet, email lists, and/or messageboards in the 1980s.)

Some interesting things to note: (1) See how fanfiction.net has a spike where there was a big drop off but then it stabilized? That’s around the time that they cracked down on adult content. (2) I expected to see Livejournal decline drastically sooner, but it actually continued to climb a bit after Strikethrough and related things, until Tumblr and AO3 both started getting very popular. Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively so far, I do think that people were starting to leave, but that there had to be critical mass elsewhere in order for that leaving to start going en masse. There were also a lot of people who continued using Livejournal while they picked up other platforms as well. (3) As my PhD student collaborator Brianna said, we have “a beautiful arc of AO3 and Tumblr being besties forever.” (This makes sense to me based on some findings from my previous work about AO3, and how Tumblr filled in the gap of social interaction left by Livejournal.)

In the “other” category of fan platforms used, the most popular was Discord. This doesn’t surprise me! For the most part, participants had only been active in it for the past couple of years, which is why it didn’t show up specifically in the survey (which was constructed based on interview data we already had). We also saw less frequent mentions of Facebook, reddit, delicious/pinboard, and IRC.

Digging into the qualitative data will give this data much more explanatory power, but I think this is very interesting! We also asked participants what their primary fandom was for each platform they used. Based on a pretty simple analysis (most popular words!), here are the top five fandoms from each platform: Usenet: Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Star Wars, Sailor Moon

Email Lists: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Gundam Wing

Messageboards: Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon

Fandom-Specific Archives: Harry Potter, Buffy, Stargate, X-Files, Doctor Who

Fanfiction.net:  Harry Potter, Naruto, Buffy, Star Wars, Gundam Wing

Livejournal: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Stargate, Doctor Who, Merlin

DeviantArt: Harry Potter, Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Supernatural, Final Fantasy

Dreamwidth: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, Stargate, RPF

Archive of Our Own: Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf

Tumblr: Marvel, Star Wars, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Teen Wolf

Twitter: Star Wars, Supernatural, Marvel, RPF, Yuri on Ice

Note that this is NOT necessarily representative of the overall popularity of certain fandoms on these platforms. Our survey, because it was targeting research questions about fandom migration, asked for participants who had been in fandom for 10+ years. This means that our results skewed older (mean 31; median 30; SD 8.6). And of course, most of the participants are currently in fandom, which means that it also misses people who have left fandom.

It is interesting to see the change across platforms and over time though! My favorite tidbit is how Star Wars was popular, dropped off, and then came back with gusto.

This is only the tip of the iceberg on this data analysis! If there’s anything else that is easily shared as we do this analysis, I’ll continue to do so. Otherwise, wish us luck and I’ll eventually share a completed analysis if/when (fingers crossed!) we publish on this.

I have a list of emails from everyone who participated and wanted to give us that info to share the results. If you’d like to be added to that list, send me an email at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu. Or just feel free to follow me here, or myself and Brianna on Twitter.

[theoldinternet]

Tamagotchi graveyard, 2000. 

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Ad for the “Dot-Cum Lounge,” San Francisco CA. 8/3/2000.

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“silicon snuff film,” wired.com. 6/5/2001.

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An example of 90s feminist “culture jamming” internet zine by Sistah Mary, May 1997. Featuring Sistah Mary’s parody of Harper’s Bazaar and its aesthetic tie-in to the Third Reich. Interestingly, it creates almost a sub-fetish when viewed through a modern lens: taking world famous super models and “Nazi-fying” them. It’s quite interesting how our perceptions and intersections of the female image change over time, even in parody media.

Entire zine can be found here.

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“Marilyn,” Marilyn. 4/30/2006.

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“Gore,” Crystal Gore. 4/30/2006.