MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 1994 Beverly Hills Internet started a free web hosting service, Geocities. For the next 15 years Geocities offered its users webspace to upload content anonymously–in effect, millions of mostly amateurish websites were generated and uploaded to Geocities as a means of creative self-expression. Geocities user “great_wise_yoda” puts it well: “I just created this place so that I could join the billions of internet users and try to express myself to the world by having a web site that nobody visits (at that end, I’ve been very successful; nobody does visit).”

At one point, Geocities was the 3rd most visited website on the Internet and, in the midst of the dot-com craze, was bought by Yahoo! for almost $4 billion in 1999. Only ten years later Yahoo! shut the service down and Geocities’ websites were to be deleted. In a move to preserve its cultural heritage as part of Internet history, the Internet Archive announced that it would try to archive as many websites as possible, because “Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory.” (“Geocities”)

20 years later, and 5 years after its shut-down, the impact of Geocities on Internet culture is still more than apparent. As a point of departure I want to examine the Internet Archive’s endeavors to preserve Geocities’s heritage in regards to creativity and self-expression on the Internet in the late 90s and early 2000s. I want to further think about a subsequent nostalgia for early Internet culture (which might go together with the current aesthetic reassessment of the 90s through street fashion and music), trends and fads on the Internet, as well as the impact Geocities has had and still has on net art and the blogosphere.

Sources

“Geocities – Archiveteam.” Archive Team. Archive Team, 1 April 2014. Web. 7 June 2014.
for reference: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Geocities