BigShinyThing

The Web has — inarguably — come a long way since the early 90s. As online has become increasingly integrated into the lives of ‘ordinary people’, so has the nature of web design changed. From the realm of ramshackle amateur production, through the work of a generation of Flash-obsessed ‘web designers’, to today’s world where back-end content management and a slew of themes and templates enable instant production of everything from blogs to online enterprises. These transformations of form and content are generally viewed as progress.

Right then. Forget about all that ‘progress’ for a bit, and settle down with a nice slow dialup connection to view Olia Lialina’s illustrated online essay Vernacular Web 2: a celebration of animated GIFs, MIDI soundfiles and glitter! glitter! glitter!

[...] Everything that became a subject of mockery by the end of the last century when professional designers arrived, everything that fell out of use and turns up every now and again as the elements of “retro” look in site design or in the works of artists exploring the theme of “digital folklore”: the “Under Construction” signs, outer space backgrounds, MIDI-files, collections of animated web graphics and so on.

Lialina nails her intent with a quote from Henry Jenkins’ 2002 article Blog This!:

“We learned in the history books about Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph, but not about the thousands of operators who shaped the circulation of messages.”

To rephrase him, I’d say we’ve studied the history of hypertext, but not the history of Metallica fan web rings or web rings in general.

This is all good stuff. From the historical archives of dancing hamsters and animated cursors, Lialina brings us up-to-date with the vernacular design cultures of MySpace, Facebook and the rest. Essential, entertaining reading (if somewhat hard on the eyes).

[Via Nettime].