Grassroots Creativity: Welcome to the 90s
Date: October 5, 2008
Disclaimer to my regular readers: This entry is part of a six-entry series on online, grassroots creativity for a “Network Cultures” class at university. Excuse the very slightly academic tone!
In Grassroots Creativity: A Very Brief History, I mentioned that the historical nature of computers and the Internet has led to and encouraged an abundance of individual and group-based creativity online. The 90s–particularly the mid to late 90s–furthered this as the World Wide Web became more popular and affordable to the everyday public; in 1998, the AT&T company of the United States released research showing online traffic was increasing over 100% annually (Coffman & Odlyzko 1998). Desktops and browsers became more user-friendly as well, partially due to browser wars, increasing the size of both the participating group and audience in many cases.
The sharing of knowledge has always been a major part of online activity, due to the Internet’s close relation to academic pursuits. One skill that was broadly shared in the mid to late 90s was that of HTML coding, which is the basic code that powers website presentation; thousands of sites existed solely to teach one how to write website markup. (I learned some via HTML Goodies.) Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford and the mind behind Creative Commons, has expressed that the Internet’s infrastructure encourages decentralized innovations (Flew, p. 67).
During the 80s, bulletin board systems (BBS) and Usenet Newsgroups were popular (for a large historical collection of BBS content, see here), and out of them came the many group sites dedicated to fan fiction and online, text role playing games in the 90s, as well as Internet Relay Chat (IRC). While these creative endeavors had existed in the earliest days of the Internet, they flourished during the 90s as more people joined in the online world. Usenet groups alone doubled in size on an annual basis. Likewise, creative community-based interactions and games were taking place on larger scales, with things like Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) being very popular.
While businesses scored and lost big during the dot-com bubble, grassroots creativity and personal websites continued. The popularity of using the Internet to express one’s own opinion, share photographs and writings has continued and is perhaps more prevalent in the 2000s to present than ever before, with the creation of blogs, the improvement of large image and video uploads and more.
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