The Geocities-izer: Spatiotemporal Internet Opportunites and Mocking Nostalgia

I just discovered the website The Geocities-izer, which posits spatiotemporal critical opportunities within cyberspace and web design. Completely destroying modern styling within web 2.0 design aesthetics, Geocities-izer makes "any website look like it was made by a 13-year old in 1996." It defaces web 2.0 CS5 and CSS aesthetics of clean, attractive design that yield a seamless user-experience. Try the New York Times newspaper website, for example. The reorientation of font, tacky GIFs, loud background colors, and the automated midi's version of British alt-rock band Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" playing on max volume (for best effect), works to conjure a mediated nostalgia of the 1990s while simultaneously exposing the heightened branding mechanisms that have entered current web design (and specifically within this example, in online newspaper branding). The Geocities-izer conjures a nostalgia that is directly tethered to 90s computer programming and internet aesthetics, while simultaneously mocking the excessive work that companies now invest in their correlative internet images and the overall cultural and economic currency in internet aesthetics. This kind of internet aesthetics reconstruction/deconstruction project raises the question of: what's the current relationship between aesthetics and content within internet identities (be it professional companies, individuals, etc.), and how does this relationship affect user-experience? I find it really interesting how the spatiotemporal aesthetic underpinnings of internet culture (and pop culture) in 1996 are now having this kind of conversation with contemporary web design and image. In this shift we can see the way in which physical and virtual identities are substantially bound together in ways that were inconceivable in 1996, positing an understanding of aesthetics and content as not only bound together but almost indecipherable and absent of distinction.

On an aside, the friend who shared this site with me, did so by intentionally posting it on my Facebook wall rather than posting it in his personal (and more public) feed. His reservations with public sharing of this site deal directly with his desire to save The Geocities-izer from trending too quickly and subsequently dying out equally as fast. In one sense, this kind of anxiety points to the evolutionary speed of internet culture and aesthetics, as well as to the trending possibilities and detriments associated to this temporal understanding of cultural consumption within cyberspace.