It's a different thing nonetheless. I don't think that the thing that makes the modern web bad is that the "unwashed masses" are using it (as several commenters here assert), it's the commercialization.
The web is no longer a place for people to be able to interact freely with each other. It's a place to monetize or be monetized. That means that a lot of the value of the web is gone, because it's value that can't be monetized without destroying it.
The "unwashed masses" (your words) are only here because companies that want to advertise to them made their systems just good enough to draw them in but just bad enough they exploit the worse instincts in people to make more advertising money.
If the web was not commercial then it wouldn't be mainstream. While they are different they are fundamentally linked.
> Libraries and highways are very mainstream and are not commercial.
I would argue that the highways are actually a counter-example of what you are saying. They exist to connect workers to businesses, businesses to other businesses, and businesses to consumers. While there is certainly an amount of traffic on the highway that is not doing those three things, we have a name for the first one in any populated area - rush hour. To say that the highway system was not intended to facilitate commerce is just historically inaccurate.
The difference between the highway system and the Internet is that the creation of the Internet was not intended to facilitate commerce - it in fact took several years (1991-1995 as best I can tell) for it to officially be allowed as the neolibs in government did not want to keep funding the network. That choice is why we are where we are with the Internet - the good and the bad.
Nice response. It's true that highways carry both commercial and non-commercial traffic, and that trucks and commercial vehicles clog up highways and make it worse for non-commercial traffic. There is also a difference between the internet (communication infrastructure) and the web (stuff that uses it), which I was wary of, so the analogy isn't perfect in OP's context.
But the vision of an information "superhighway" should be something that is better than regular highways. The good news is that network bandwidth is much easier to add than highway lanes, and is increasing at a much faster rate than human bandwidth.
I'm using the web as a synecdoche for the Internet as a whole because before the Web there wasn't much of a reason for Joe and Jane Q Public to use the Internet.
The Internet was intentionally commercialized and privatized as a third step in its development, from DARPA project, to education/research network, to what we have today.
Mainstreaming is a side effect of its broadening scope; as college students graduated and scholars took their work home with them, the NSFnet backbone was ceded to Sprintlink, and OS/hardware developers started working on consumer-grade interfaces.
I miss the Internet of the 90s because every page I visit today has a pop-up asking me if I want to accept cookies. It makes browsing the open web a jarring experience.
Why the EU didn’t require an ability to do global opt-opt while forcing web sites to implement this feature is a mystery to me.
Well, it became mainstream by the late 1990s (IIRC the pets.com superbowl ad was 1999). But in 1992 or so it was still a bunch of Gopher sites (this new fangled "World Wide Web" will never displace this technology...) and MUDs being used by college students and hobbyists.
In 1993, UNC Charlotte had one computer in its library with a big sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. It would be a few years yet before home computers became commonplace in that region, and late ‘90’s before everyone was more likely than not to have a computer at home, and to have some sort of dial-up internet. I was purchasing domains in 1997-1998 for $3/ea, I believe (I wish I could have known then what I know now…). I sold my first website design job in ‘96, which would probably coincide with when many businesses around Charlotte were establishing websites for the first time.
Fun to think about.
In this context, “mainstream” may just be another way to describe Web 2.0.
I think this is genuinely true. The internet today appeals to the lowest common denominator, in the same way that blockbuster movies often do. It is less appealing because it is less specific to our tastes.
We hate the internet today because it became mainstream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September