A Vernacular Web

A Vernacular Web

An extended and illustrated version of my talk at the Decade of Web
Design Conference in Amsterdam, January 2005

http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

When I started to work on the World Wide Web I made a few nice things
that were special, different and fresh. They were very different from
what was on the web in the mid 90's.

I'll start with a statement like this, not to show off my contribution,
but in order to stress that – although I consider myself to be an early
adopter – I came late enough to enjoy and prosper from the "benefits of
civilization". There was a pre-existing environment; a structural,
visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you
could break. There was a world of options and one of the options was to
be different.

So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and
when did it end?

To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction.
It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built
on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more
powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous…or
the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed
away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines
designed by usability experts.

I wrote that change was coming "soon" instead of putting an end date at
1998, for example, because there was no sickness, death or burial. The
amateur web didn't die and it has not disappeared but it is hidden.
Search engine rating mechanisms rank the old amateur pages so low
they're almost invisible and institutions don't collect or promote them
with the same passion as they pursue net art or web design.

Over the past ten year the number of amateur pages have dropped. It