>But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on.. Reddit
A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever do for us?"[1] sketch.
"apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for helping voices being heard?"
I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a modem.
DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me.
And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it.
Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there. That's why the things you write there actually get read by other people. Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the same font and style, as to not distract the reader from the content.
In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be.
[2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply link to https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/ instead of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google
Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.
A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever do for us?"[1] sketch.
"apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for helping voices being heard?"
I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a modem.
DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me.
And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it.
Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there. That's why the things you write there actually get read by other people. Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the same font and style, as to not distract the reader from the content.
In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be.
[1]http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html
[2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply link to https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/ instead of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google
Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.