Time Warp!

Generation Y? This one's for you.

There was a time when the internet was, well...a mess. Not messy in the modern sense of comment sections gone wild or real-time celebrity nervous breakdowns making the 24-hour news cycle; rather, an explosion of creativity and innovation occured seemingly overnight and gave us some of the most enduring websites and concepts. The prospect of having one's very own website was most exciting. That some kid from the small wonder state of Delaware could build a digital version of what was in her imagination and spill it out into the world wide web was all made possible at the turn of the millenium.

I started building websites when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I was diagnosed with mononucleosis in the 5th grade and had a lot of free time to dink around on the ol' family PC, so I taught myself photo editing and html. My first experiments in website building never saw the light of day as I was using microsoft publisher and uploading took LITERAL DAYS. Even on our "high speed" connection, using a program as clunky as Publisher meant my content was more or less being converted into huge images (remember word art, folks?? The north remembers!) and thus, watching my pages make their way onto the internet was painfully slow. But it gives me pause. Look around. TikTok? Reels? And my favorite pastime of doom scrolling :P Short-form content is constantly streaming into our brains through our little smart phones and I'm reminded of the anticipation of sitting through that gawd-awful dialup sound just to access my email via America Online. Those were the days.

And. I can't believe I'm saying this, but then again have you SEEN this website? ;D ...I miss it. Even the process of uploading my first site (a Spice Girls fanpage) which as I said took hours and hours per sitting, was all in all a joyous experience.There is something so depressing about watching millions of content creators slapping a filter on, spending 15 min speaking into their iphones to sell you a product, and knowing that this 15 second ad sprinkled amongst instagram stories and tiktoks is what we think of as creative marketing? All this to say: I miss when the internet was a slow, clunky, beautiful mess.

Social media in particular has become faster than the speed of light. Which is why in my nostalgia quest, I knew I had to pay tribute to the first comprehensive social media website we all had access to: Myspace. Yes. Myspace. Since I had been doing elementary coding since I was, well, in elementary school...I found myself in a space that was telling me that I was now part of a network of "profiles". Cool. A profile. Something that told the world who I was on just one page. The only problem was, these pages were clinical and ugly as sin. But. People older and smarter than I were already hard at work figuring our what we called overrides. These were chunks of code we could copy + paste into our profiles about section that would take our pages from looking like a hospital aesthetic, to completely customized. I made my own psychedelic tile backgrounds, header images, edited my photos to look like polariod pictures, and became so well-known for doing this that all of my friends asked me to help them do the same. Which I did. Even for some notable personalities. I worked on Miss Pamela's profile when I was in town (pictured above, restored as best as I could manage thanks to theinternetarchive and my own photobucket) <3 No one paid me cash for this because I was so fast and I was using this site to network. A teenager and a high school drop out, I knew I had not just the skills but the vision to make really unique myspace pages because I wasn't using the popular emo-style. I was making these profiles as if they were being designed to appeal to someone from the 1960s/70s heyday. I took payment in the form of backstage passes and invites to whatever hollywood happenings that struck my fancy.

Wow. Dig the antique vibes!

So it's a funny thing, really. I look around instagram now and notice the myspace era aesthetic coming back into vogue. But I know that -my- myspaces (I had multiple pages including a graphics one apparently! According to this image I was on a sort of antique-y kick) never looked like what was popular at the time. I was too obsessed with the 60s counterculture and 70s glam aesthetics to be bothered with what was hip and now. Well, it was hip and now back then, anyway ;D Sadly when Myspace Tom forked over his stake in his brainchild, it was only a matter of time before all of those profiles bit the dust. We all got emails with instructions on how to save our old photos and blogs but it didn't work, and no one could do a damn thing about it. My bestie had the wherewithal to record what our pages looked like on her digital camera and then did something I thought was insane at the time: she put it on VHS. I don't know where that particular tape is but she also made sure that the internet archive via the wayback machine crawled her myspace in 2006 and although the background image and the links aren't functional, it's a wild step back to the way things were. We were all a lot happier. There was less room for bullying. I'm not saying it didn't happen but we all knew the point was to have FUN. And if you were a bully, there was no point in participating in social networking. That is, until Facebook came around. A hideous, un-customizable newsfeed that was originally built for collegiate losers to rate the f*ckability of the females that matriculated around them. Allowing facebook to overtake myspace in popularity was a grave societal mistake. Tumblr came around as a closer solution but the bullying I mentioned before that was very sparse on myspace was now a lot more accessible for the trolls.

Advertising has poisoned every corner of social media and it feels like someone is always trying to sell you something. I don't bemoan anyone for making a living on platforms like tiktok, youtube, or instagram. But a little transparency would be nice. Most ~influencers~ are paid in free product and maybe some cash but not anywhere near as much as companies used to have to spend on advertising firms that were doing the same amount of work or less. Further, we small creators and businesses have to come up with our own ads which takes a lot of time and energy from the process of actually creating the product/brand we've come here to sell to you. So that's why I've built my website in the style that I have. It's why I've started blogging again. For my own mental health, I'm slowing this runaway train down. I don't expect to go viral (I hate that phrase), but I suppose that's the point. The time you took to read this blog was hopefully a little walk down memory lane but more importantly, a mini-vacation from the endless zombiescroll of today's internet: social media marketing, short form content with no soul, disinformation from the twitter factory, and all the things I hate about the internet. If you need another break from it all, you're always welcomed back to dollierocker.com <3 I'm always working on oldschool fan pages, blogs, longer videos and slower sweeter content for you. Come back soon!