Welcome to the 158th insertion of DEMUR®, an analytical series highlighting the intricacies of the artistic world and the minutiae lying within. In this episode, we plug in and log on, stepping foot into the metaverse to trace the World Wide Web’s influence on media, communication and style.
The year was 1983, cleanup had begun across the globe as partiers dragged their hungover selves out of bed, left only with fragmented memories from the night before. Celebrating the turn of a new year, many would begin their resolutions as the clock struck midnight, but the United States Defense Department had other ideas.
Over the last decade, researchers had been working to develop a new communications protocol, allowing computers to “talk” to each other on a standardized network. This method of relay would outcompete previous technologies by a landslide, ultimately establishing the Internet’s foreground. On January 1st, 1983, the Defense Data Network switched to the latest protocol suite, known as ‘TCP/IP’, altering humanity’s core fundamentals.
The internet would take on a recognizable form in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Allowing access to a series of hyperlinks and websites, we’d see the disruption of social-based networks like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube shortly after. Cultivating a slew of Y2K trends, stylistic oddities and abbreviated forms of speech, this new age would provide our first glimpse of virtual reality as users came to life.
Almost instantly, the digital sphere impacted the very nature in which we lived. Everything shifted to a pixelated medium from the music we heard to the games we played. Online multiplayer games grew in popularity while chatrooms and globalized trends sparked an onslaught of eCommerce orders. Being entirely new to the online axis, fashion as a whole would experience a massive overhaul, enabling micro-trends and pervasive marketing tactics.
Only growing, we near a maximalist approach to the digital age, growing closer to an entirely virtual reality. Adapting social media as a lifeform of its own, a world of Artificial Intelligence and algorithmic dictation awaits us.
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