Must-Read: Todd van der Werff: 2015 Is the Year the Old Internet Finally Died
Must-Read: Death of the net! Film at 11…
: 2015 Is the Year the Old Internet Finally Died: “A very basic fear–the idea that the internet as we knew it…
…of five or 10 or 20 years ago, is going away…. And none of us… can stop it…. Take a look at your browser tabs if you’re reading this on a computer…. Longform pieces are the pinnacle to which lots and lots of us writers and the websites we work for aspire…. [But] because longform takes time… for writers to produce and readers to read… as both Buzzfeed and Gawker realized early on, well-done longform could be the steak, but it couldn’t be the meal…. The internet has made it clear that the kinds of things that people want to read are sort of an endless collection of what’s cool. And that might be a longform story, or it might be the quick, clicky little things that repackage the best flotsam and jetsam out there…. The theory always went that BuzzFeed couldn’t be all cat GIFs, because it would very quickly wear out its welcome…. [But] social media has, essentially, turned every content provider into a syndicator…. The best syndicators were always those who could take the most crowd-pleasing stuff and get it before as many eyeballs as possible… comic strips… advice columns… ultimately disposable…. If you work in online media, that’s terrifying….
The internet of 10 years ago… was a world… of blogs and sites with strong, central identities… built almost entirely around voice…. Mobile has ultimately downplayed the importance of words…. And the rise of social has flipped the old writer/reader balance… you share an article because… it says something about you, whether that fact is that you’re angry about a political issue, or that you like cute bunnies, or that you love Back to the Future…. The old internet was, ultimately, a world of communities… the idea that if you created a place where people could gather based around shared interests, they ultimately would. It was the ideal of the original internet made real, an actual, virtual web…. Now, however, our articles increasingly seem to be individual insects trapped in someone else’s web…
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