In a 1964 article entitled New Media and the Arts published in the University of Wisconson’s Arts in Society, Marshall McLuhan summarized his theory of media as so:

To sum this up, it can be enunciated as a principle that all new media or technologies, whatever, create new environments, psychic and social, that assume as their natural content the earlier technologies. Moreover, the content of these new environments undergoes a progressive reshaping so that what had appeared earlier as dishevelled and degraded becomes conventionalized into an artistic genre. TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase. The movie remained in such a dishevelled phase for decades. Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal environment that assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon. The principle of new technology as an archetypal environment that moulds new art forms out of the antecedent technologies is a principle that applies to all the arts and sciences, to architecture as much as to music, or mathematics. This principle affords a means of swift insight into the most complex phases of the life of culture forms.

From 1994-2009, GeoCities provided free web hosting to tens of millions of small, independent pages. Today “social media” users are familiar with easy-to-use “web-apps” which run in the browser, allowing them to create websites as easily as PowerPoint slide shows. But in the “Web 1.0” days webpages for sites like GeoCities necessitated creating and editing text files using the HyperText Markup Language in order to define the layout of the page. Early social media giant MySpace is a transitional website, necessitating a somewhat uniform layout while allowing for much whackyness and customization through HTML and CSS. But Facebook, Twitter, etc. today only allow users a minimum of control over their profile screens — they are “web pages” in only the most technical sense.

With infinite customization being the defacto standard, Web 1.0 was often very ugly. There were many talented designers, but mostly a ton of absurdly ugly sites. Web archaeologists like @GIFModel will never run out of fascinating and horrible niche websites from decades ago to share with the world. The web was, as McLuhan puts it above, dishevelled.

Well, today, we see this old web as the content of the new thing.

Neocities.org is a free webhost for small websites in the style of GeoCities. However, unlike GeoCities, it features a full Web 2.0 style wrapper and showcase around the small independent websites it hosts.

Instead of just having the “web” of inter-linked html pages, we get a top-down view of all of them in a mosaic, catalogued and tagged. NeoCities also offers Web 2.0 style website building tools, as well as a fully-featured HTML editor web-app to spare you from having to upload text-files edited on your own computer. Furthermore, most of these webpages are actually quite beautifully designed — far more so than the crappy free website I made in high-school. Basically, a website was “good” if you could read the text against the background picture and nothing blinked so much as to induce health problems. But here on NeoCities it is obvious that creators are treating their sites like pieces of art, showing off what the simple, powerful hypertext medium is capable of. It helps that there has been +25 years of best practices and techniques and examples to learn from.

So two of McLuhan’s most fundamental hold true for this particular example:

  1. The old environment, hand-made hypertexual Web 1.0, is content for the new, server-side generated, web-app-centric Web 2.0.
  2. The old thing, which was dishevelled in its time, has been streamlined into an art form with noticeable genres, styles etc. as content.

I really suggest you check out NeoCities.org, it’s a lot of fun and rather nostalgic. I particularly like this Serial Experiment Lain fansite.