I have written elsewhere in my archives/diaries about this, but many people logging onto YouTube now to go and listen to some popular or not so popular song are entirely unaware of the fact that, once upon a time, in the late 1990's, logging onto the Internet and trying to hear a song was not just something that took awhile to do, as a result of the oh so horrific 56k download speeds, but was actually something that was also hard to do and also quite tricky. Many people, for instance, in the Matrix in which we are living today, typically point to Sean Parkers Napster as where the entire MP3 audio craze began ... and they are quite right to do that, of course...but the truth is that there was another place where song file trading happened even before Napster, and in my opinion I have always thought that the Pre-napster world was rather interesting, mostly because 1. I think it now is beginning to foreshadow what the future of the Internet might wind up being "all over again" and 2. I think it was ...well, sort of like the Deep web seems to be now. At least to me.
This is because the early pre-napster world of songtrading was one that, in my opinion, not just anyone could have logged on to participate in. The user sort of had to be initiated into an online club of sorts, usually -- from what I first witnessed, as a young boy watching my oldest cousin -- in mIRC ("Internet Relay Chat") and then from there you had to sort of hang around in a chat room, sometimes for quite awhile, asking around and also really digging around, in a way that would be unimaginable to todays youths, in order to get what you were looking for. You also of course would perhaps have to wait weeks or months in order to get a request shot down the line to you, because someone would have to go hunting for it out in the real world or of course they would have to maybe browse around on other chat channels that only they - and not you - had access to .
And again, as I said, the biggest part of all was that you really had to be accepted into a sort of club, in the first place, in order to get into the specific chat room that had all the goodies. Certain chat rooms had certain goods and they might not let you into them or the specific name of the chat channel might never be given out so you could have never logged into it, no matter how badly you wanted. Everything was all under wraps...filled with secrecy. This of course made it so that there was a certain sense of achievement to "ganking" the files that you were looking to gank. It did not just happen for anyone. I vividly remember being in middle school, during the early 00's, being one of the only kids for instance, in my class, who had the abililty to get practically any episode of certain animes that anyone in the class wanted. I would often actually make money burning the episodes of the more well known animes , like Dragon Ball Z, that the IRC connections would give me. The kids in the early 00's middle school class could not believe that someone had access to these episodes in this manner. These days of course, you log onto YouTube , and you can often find -- just like it is with the songs -- very often any anime episode you want, just typing its name in. You can even find full feature films . I have watched a few short anime series almost entirely on there. Years ago these might have been series that I would of had to search high and low for down these rather dark mIRC avenues for months. Don't think I don't remember! Because I do. Granted, I was just a little boy of 12 then, but I still remember it all quite vividly, and often I look at the Internet as it is now, and I almost can't believe what it is that I'm looking at.
This is of course when I remember again: Oh yes...she's been all but colonized now. Mostly. But of course the colonization isn't over, as I was saying in the firs paragraph....and unfortunately there is, I think, much more to go, and this brings us back to the deep web, and the way I am convinced that the future of the NET is going to be just like the Internets past, as I said,all over again. It's all going to start tripping and bleeding off into these little exclusive clubs again, and this time of course it's going to be much, much more interesting (but also much worse and more severe and serious) because now we are looking at an Internet that, unlike the 90s', the entire world is on! The truth is that , and I always say this because I cannot get over it, but at the first point in time that I eve rlogged onto the Internet back in 1998 or 99 or whenever it was as a little squirt, literally only 5% -- 5 PERCENT! - of the world had logged on with me.
These numbers are very different now, because now it is something like ... (runs a Google search) now it is 47%, in 2017, and back in 2005 it was 16%. It sounds really ridiculous to a lot of us in the so called "Developed world"...but it's the case..and of course, the more people that log on, the more regulated this is all gonna get, to the point where it is eventually going to start looking just like the real world does now. And once this happens, that is when the depth of the internet is going to truly reveal itself, because layers are going to start unfolding, just like they do here in reality. The surface of the Internet that the layperson or the uninitiated will access in the future will be just like the surface was for my middle school buddies back in the days of AOL Online: It'll look interesting, but they won't know where the - as they say - real good and crazy shit is at. It's completely possible in fact, I sometimes think, that even things like, who knows, porn and many music videos - stuf that is all right now easily accessible-- might wind up being moved completely off the surfaces of the Web, and into the deep and dark layers where one will be forced to browse and get initiated and put up a bit of a fight, in order to get what they are looking for. I suppose it seems hard to believe now; but it also once seemed hard to believe that people would be able to listen to literally the entire discography of Metallica (ha-ha-ha) on YouTube, without worrying about Uncle Sam or Lars Ulrich coming to get them. For even in the days when Napster had first gone mainstream and everyone was using it and the Internet had moved beyond that mIRC period I talked of chat rooms, even then everyone was very paranoid about downloading songs in a way that no one at all seems to be on YouTube...
Sometimes I think of it and I can honestly imagine a whole other "world within a world" popping up in the Deep Web, a world that'll be literally filled with all types of underground news broadcasts, underground films, underground everything. Indeed I think the future of the Internet is going to be something much different than what we can imagine it being and ...though I am sure it'll be exciting in its own way, I can't say I'm really looking forward to it all that much, because so far as I can tell, it seems like it might ultimately wind up being one hell of a major, major pain in the aZz .......
Alas:
Logging off.
KiM "gEnji San"
No comments:
Post a Comment