Ah, the Warmth of the Old, Friendly Internet. For Real?
January 30, 2025
I never thought I’d be looking back at the Internet of yesteryear nostalgically. I hated the sound of dial-up and the instant messaging sounds were annoying. Also AOL had the knack of clogging up machines with browsing history making everything slow. Did I mention YouTube wasn’t around? There are somethings that were better in the past, including parts of the Internet, but not all of it.
We also like to think that the Internet was “safer” and didn’t have predatory content. Wrong! Since the Internet’s inception, parents were worried about their children being the victims of online predators. Back then it was easier to remain anonymous, however. El País agrees that the Internet was just as bad as it is today: “‘The internet Hasn’t Made Us Bad, We Were Already Like That’: The Mistake Of Yearning For The ‘Friendly’ Online World Of 20 Years Ago."
It’s strange to see artists using Y2K era technology as art pieces and throwbacks. It’s a big eye-opener to aging Millennials, but it also places these items on par with the nostalgia of all past eras. All generations love the stuff from their youth and proclaim it to be superior. As the current youth culture and even those middle-aged are obsessed with retro gear, a new slang term has arisen: “cozy tech.”
“‘Cozy tech’ is the label that groups together content about users sipping from a steaming cup, browsing leisurely or playing nice, simple video games on devices with smooth, ergonomic designs. It’s a more powerful image than it seems because it conveys something we lost at some point in the last decade: a sense of control; the idea that it is possible to enjoy technology in peace again.”
They’re conflating the idea with reading a good book or listening to music on a record player. These “cozy tech” people are forgetting about the dangers of chatrooms or posting too much information on the Internet. Dare we bring up Omegle without drifting down channels of pornography?
Check out this statement:
“Mayte Gómez concludes: “We must stop this reactionary thinking and this fear of technology that arises from the idea that the internet has made us bad. That is not true: we were already like that. If the internet is unfriendly it is because we are becoming less so. We cannot perpetuate the idea that machines are entities with a will of their own; we must take responsibility for what happens on the internet.”
Sorry, Mayte, I disagree. Humans have always been unfriendly. We now have a better record of it.
Whitney Grace, January 30, 2025
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