So, we’re all content creators. It doesn’t pay the bills for the majority of us, but we’re keeping the cogs of industry turning, much like we do by filling up the aisles of supermarkets or behemoth shopping centres.
Q. When did this happen?
A. Probably the day we popped our Freeserve CD-Rom into our home PC and installed the software that gave us access to the internet.
What on earth is going on in that cover image below, and can anyone remember what they did with their extremely generous “free 15mb web space”?
We are talking almost a quarter of a century ago so I’ll forgive you if you don’t recall exactly what you signed up for or agreed to in the late 1990’s. I’m fairly sure that I never read anything about becoming a content creator as a condition of access to the rest of the world from an MDF desk in the corner of my parents’ bedroom.
Q. HOW did this happen then?
A. We were content creators long before the once excruciating (now warm and nostalgic) dial up internet tone rang throughout our homes for the first time. The World Wide Web just provided the missing pieces of the puzzle.
- Audience
We could only show the photos we took on holiday to friends and family when they’d visit to collect their souvenirs.
Now we’re free to bore them, and total strangers the whole year round. We don’t even need to worry about providing a stick of rock in exchange for their attention.
2. Distribution
Those who produced a ‘round-robin letter‘ to accompany their Christmas cards each year, could become evergreen with their writing, without the need for stamps.
Btw, I like this line from the Wikipedia article for the round-robin letter.
“Critics have drawn attention to a number of typical negative characteristics of the letters, including the airbrushing of bad news, the “excruciating” level of banal detail, and the implied egocentricity and boastfulness of the sender.”
Sound familiar? 😏
Without these two components, much of my very first content creation (and we all know an artist’s early work is often their best) has gone unseen for nearly 30 years. I hadn’t even seen it myself for decades until I was rummaging for something in the garage recently and spotted the word ‘Diary’.
These are the pages from this fortnight in 1994.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing as I flipped through the book. It was like having my own memories gifted back to me.
I’m obsessed with dates (the calendar kind, not fruit or romantic). From when I started blogging in 2004 through to the thousands of photos I take on my phone each year, I have a pretty good timeline of my life. What’s been missing is some context for the earlier half. This book and others in the same box long forgotten have helped fill so much in.
The other thing that struck me the more I looked at the book was how similarly these pages were structured to Instagram posts. A set space for an image, with a caption below.
To be clear, I’m not saying I could lay claims to the patent. More that the reason Instagram and all of these platforms work is because their roots are in all of our roots. Creation is in our nature.
Liam Toms 