At a time when everyone has become a medium for information, when everyone shares their opinion, their photos, and snippets of their life all over the Web; at a time when technology enables us to keep in touch with our friends, our family and our colleagues at all times; at a time when everything moves quickly, when we expect an instant response; and at a time when everyone is permanently connected, we often contradict ourselves by talking more and more about our need to disconnect.
a mouse from web 1.0
Orange has thrown itself into this debate and has launched the “time collective”, a reflection on society and the place that the latest technologies hold in our lives. In doing so, they have organized BarCamps, produced a documentary, participated in conferences such as the Women’s Forum, and even staged a TEDx event.
On the digital side, our colleagues from Orange France run the “le collectif” (“the collective”) site, and have created the collectif du temps (“time collective”) section, offering a wide range of information relating to this issue. As the site’s articles are only available in French, we’re giving our English-speaking readers the opportunity to read one of their articles, entitled “Nostalgia for Web 1.0”, a subject that everyone can identify with, and that is sure to evoke some memories for many of you!
Nostalgia for Web 1.0 – The revival of CaraMail and Geocities
At a time when Instagram is all-conquering, giving an ageing sheen to the present; and as our cultural history is being archived daily via YouTube, the protection and restoration of programs that have drifted from our collective digital memory appears to be a concern for a growing number of web users, who are attempting to revive CaraMail and other sites.
a caramel chat
In 1999, it was the golden era for Web 1.0… Less than 15% of French people were connected to the internet, and there was no Facebook or Twitter. The 56K modem, a speed that would seem painfully slow today, crackled away on the desk. We looked on nervously as our 50 hours of access counted down on an Internet Explorer 5.5 browser, waiting for the ill-timed disconnection that would cut us off mid-sentence while chatting with “Mimi_94” or “Sylvie75”, reducing our sentences to almost nothing (“chat by phone?”), and squashing any hope of a “real” encounter…
At the time, for those venturing onto CaraMail to chat, in the hope of finding a soul mate or perhaps just a date, the Internet was slowly taking over from Minitel (3615 Ulla). The forefather of all our social networks, CaraMail, was one of the biggest community web portals for French speakers, with around 40,000 people logged on at any one time in 2003. Created in 1997 by the founders of the Lokace search engine, the site didn’t just offer a chat room, but also webmail, forums, a magazine (Carazine), a directory (Carafuté), a document storage facility (Caramalette), and an auction site (Caraplazza). Bought by Lycos in 2000, it saw its visitor numbers gradually drop away as it underwent an interface redesign…
A web user with a sense of nostalgia for the first version of CaraMail found the java applet from the time and encoded an old-style server to breathe new life into the “chat” feature of this Internet 1.0 classic. The result – a web-based form of CaraMail intended for nostalgic tech geeks – is amusing, but may seem strange and difficult to navigate for today’s avid users of Twitter, Facebook and even Instagram…
Memories, memories…
For the most curious, CaraMail’s founder, Oriane Garcia, a true icon of the Web in France in the late-1990s, published her “cyber memoirs” at the end of 2011!
In fact, users from the early days of the World Wide Web are still very active, with some continuing to keep the flame of those early days alight. As such, Davduf and his site, “La Rafale”, a trendy blog in the style of a detective novel, created “23 November 1995, in your sleep” and “died 23 November 1996, in your sleep”. A Facebook page has also been set up with the aim of reviving the coolest and most popular of social sites from the early days of the French Internet: “Nirvanet”. As for Wanadoo, France Telecom’s pioneering web portal (remember that?), Patrice Carré gives a very good account of its beginnings in the mid-1990s on the Culture Mobile site.
the Deleted City
Another restoration of a swallowed-up virtual world, The Deleted City is a program for touchscreen devices containing all of the data preserved by the Americans from The Archive Team, when Geocities was closed down by Yahoo! in 2009. This “team” is made up of around 100 web users, bloggers and developers, all angered by the disappearance of Geocities, a free web hosting service founded in 1994, and one of the first online social networks: “ Yahoo! carried out the largest destruction of historic data in living memory, and all in the blink of an eye, too. Millions of files and user accounts disappeared”, the Archive Team explains.
In the six months leading up to the site closing down, they managed to collect the vast majority of the data that had been available to download at that time. The Dutch artist Richard Vijgen designed a digital interface which, like the ruins of Pompeii, reconstructs the fossilized memory. One of the particular features of Geocities was the use of urban terminology (towns, districts, streets) to designate organizational models of its communities. The Deleted City is like an archeological dig, where a digital place that had fallen into the abyss is being made visible once again today, but which had formerly hosted a huge community of web users, and remains one of the most fascinating primitive forms of our social networks…
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