Gannaway_Lialina Response

Olia Lialina's Vernacular Web 1 & 2 (2005-07) discuss the early environment of the Internet, during the 1990's. This virtual world, as Lialina describes, had its own aesthetic, unique to the Internet referred to as Web 2.0 (late 1990s'/early 2000s'). Lialina mentions the "under construction" logos, and "starry night" imagery which filled the developing Internet.

This early Internet began to change when the "amateur" Internet was "washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts." The new Internet, Vernacular Web, starts to bring in "Home Pages", "MySpace", "Garden Gnomes" and more perhaps identity branding images. However, while these new creations or variations of the old creations, Lialina describes that, "by encouraging the user to “feel at home” services create more distance between the users and themselves." Lialina continues to draw a connection between the professional vs. the amateur, and the rich vs. the poor. This comparison exemplifies Google as a professional or rich entity that creates an environment in which the amateurs (or poor) can play in, feeling that they have some individual presence, even if it's only a Google-made customizable "Personal Homepage." This is one part of the reading that I could relate closely to. I don't remember the Internet of the 1990s' but the Internet today is highly commercialized and structured, when compared to past phases of the Internet. This can be problematic because adds and business fills the Internet of today, and seems to only be increasing its presence. As Cory Arcangel (and other artists I'm sure) call attention to the pervasiveness of advertising in his piece "Punk Rock 101". The influx of commercial presence on the Internet serves to de-value and distract from the perhaps more modest information/media/ideas that are not driven by profit.