The Good Old Days of the Internet :: Personal Narrative Essay Example

I read an essay about how the web has changed since the good old days. It talked about the beginning of weblogs (aka- blogs), how they used to represent something essential about the web... and now (of course) they've become so common (thanks to programs like Blogger), that their original purpose had been lost. Â   The essay talked about how people who discovered the web recently (like me I suppose), were missing out on the original spirit of the web because commercial sites had overrun everything, and we didn't have true web logs to point us towards the small, personal sites behind the billboards. And on and on... I had a hard time grasping the underlying point of the essay, besides the fact that it sounded like someone talking about how they heard That Band live, back when they were Cool, before they 'Sold Out'. But the idea that somehow the true spirit of the web was now compromised because of big commercial sites seemed a bit strange. Like somehow Nike.com was stealing the soul of geocities.com/my_neighborhood/my_weblog.html. That struck me as BS. Us poor newcomers are apparently being deprived of the 'true' web experience because of commercial sites. Â   I'd almost suggest just the opposite... the peculiar shifts that retail sales have had to undergo in order to do business on the internet have contributed as much to web culture as sites of cool underground links, or tributes to beloved deceased pets. Even the gawd-awful get-rich-quick auto-generated MLM sites and the horrid Free for All links pages are part of the culture of the web. And us newcomers, if we really take interest in this strange alternate universe, can find the odd, underground personal sites if we look. Â   To say that slick corporate sites are ruining the culture of the web would be like saying department stores like Macy's or Bloomingdale's ruined the culture of New York City. By god, NYC should have no commercial enterprise bigger than those those kitschy little kosher delis, family-owned New York pizza shops and Asian groceries. Anything bigger and slicker than that is an outrage. And NYC really has too many poeple now... all these newcomers just don't get it. Their clueless antics are ruining our city's culture. Those obnoxious street performers, and pushy three-card-monte scam artists! To say nothing of the homeless! How uncool are they? Â