Cybercultural
Cybercultural
Richard MacManus
Cybercultural chronicles internet history and its cultural impact, from the pre-web era to the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, and beyond. Written by pioneering tech blogger Richard MacManus.
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An image from the Internet 1996 World Exposition book; via Internet Archive. 1996 was a year of continued growth for the World Wide Web, although the number of websites had yet to crack the 1 million mark — in June 1996 there were an...
The CD version of David Bowie's online single, 'Telling Lies', 1996; via kupindo.com. In an interview featured in the 1998 book “The Interactive Music Handbook,” Larry Rosen — CEO of an online music services company called N2K — provided...
Rocktropolis, a mid-1990s online music website. The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) is the undoubted pioneer of online music, with its website launching at the end of 1993. But over two years later, in early 1996, IUMA was...
David Bowie's first website, 1995; via leontakesusoutside.com. As the internet became more interactive over 1995, it became a more attractive place for musicians to set up a web presence. David Bowie was one of the first to do this. On...
Jeff Bezos showing off his new website Amazon.com, September 1995; via Seattle Times. At the beginning of 1995, the internet was still largely the domain of academic-minded geeks and Silicon Valley hippies. But the culture at large was...
"I am part of the Rebel Alliance #FediverseForFreedom"; image by Andy Piper via Mastodon. Every time I come across someone I respect in the web world who is still posting on X (formally Twitter), I can't help but wince. There are even...
Cyberculture pioneer Alice Mary Hilton; background image: Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway (1995). If you search for “cyberculture” today in Wikipedia, you are re-directed to the page for “Internet culture” — which rightly...
Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic in the 1995 movie. At the same time as tools like GeoCities emerged to help people create a home on the web, mainstream culture was beginning to colonize the internet. Three big budget movies were released...
Beverley Hills Internet in 1995, before being renamed GeoCities. By 1995, people had begun to create their own web pages on the World Wide Web — or “home pages” as they were called back then. Previously, home pages had typically been...
Netscape's mascot, Mozilla, in 1994; artist: Dave Titus. The World Wide Web was in its infancy as 1994 dawned. There were just 623 websites in the entire world at the beginning of the year. By June 1994, that figure had risen to 2,738...
Tagged "Lana Del Rey" in Tumblr, November 2012; screenshot via Wayback Machine. When 20-year old David Karp launched Tumblr in February 2007, he positioned his new product as an easy-to-use alternative to traditional blogging software....
Netscape browser, 1994; screenshot via YouTube. Netscape was founded in 1994 on the premise of bringing multimedia to the internet via a web browser. The initial focus was on managing basic multimedia elements — particularly images, but...
IUMA's Jeff Patterson and Rob Lord; photo via Good Times. Although much of the interactive multimedia focus was on CD-ROMs during 1994, there were some multimedia experiments happening on the World Wide Web. Of particular note was a...
Gangnam Style, the most popular YouTube video of 2012. If 2012 was the year that Web 2.0 quietly died, it was also when a new kind of internet was born: a more mobile and visual one, with images and videos leading the way. Facebook’s...
Lana Del Rey in Video Games, uploaded to YouTube in May 2011. On May 5, 2011, a little known musician named Lana Del Rey posted a video for her song Video Games to YouTube, describing it as "Hollywood Sad Core" and "Gangster Nancy...