Wednesday 17 May 2017

http referer

Via Kottke, we are directed to a reflection on how the online environment has changed in the past decade by technology correspondent Alexis Madrigal writing for The Atlantic. The article is definitely worth reading through and of course where we are with the internet becomes all the more absorbing when conditioned with the filter of time and wondering how things might be different.
As a fellow purveyor of fine hypertext products surely appreciates diverting from one playground to explore others—or in other terms, to escape from a walled-garden, the central thesis of Madrigal’s argument is encapsulated by those who dare click on a link—with discrimination, sadly, as there are an awful lot of imposters and catch-penny sites and worse out there. What do you think? For better or worse, in 2007—which also saw the iPhone become commercially available, the internet was a quite different network of connections where as much happened below the surface and behind the scenes and parting that curtain to follow the daisy-chain of links to an unexpected place was more routine, whereas after the growth of social platforms (parallel with the pace of the progress of mobility) and dominance—at the expense of the monumental architecture of entities like Wikipedia and the blogosphere though there are quite a few troopers and true-believers, most of the action is on the surface and corralled.