Don't confuse people's tendency to no longer bother looking past the top of the first page of Google with the internet somehow shrinking into whatever fits those slots. Of course the most popular sites now dominate the top of Google's search results, but Google isn't the internet any more than Facebook is.
The breadth and depth of information on the web now vastly surpasses what was available in 1994. Youtube and other video and music streaming sites have provided a media revolution to compare with the transition from radio to television. Social media, whatever its drawbacks are, allows people to communicate and collaborate far more personally than email or basic chatrooms would have.
And let's not even get into the ways that Javascript, HTML5 and Webassembly have and will transform the web into a platform in which virtual machines will converge to becoming just another content type. I know people here like to rend their garments and scream Javascript Delenda Est[0] into the void and just hope everything that happened to the web in the last 20 years just goes away, but the day is coming where all archived and obsolete code will have a URL endpoint that bootstraps a VM and runs it. The best the web of 1994 could do is file downloads, maybe Java applets and flash.
Sometimes the way people here seem to dismiss the modern web is baffling. I get it, but look at it from the point of view of the mainstream web user. The web offers access to so much more than would even have been possible in 1994, and lets people interact with one another on a much more direct and complex level.
Yes, the added richness and depth comes with a lot of baggage, but its undeniably there.
The breadth and depth of information on the web now vastly surpasses what was available in 1994. Youtube and other video and music streaming sites have provided a media revolution to compare with the transition from radio to television. Social media, whatever its drawbacks are, allows people to communicate and collaborate far more personally than email or basic chatrooms would have.
And let's not even get into the ways that Javascript, HTML5 and Webassembly have and will transform the web into a platform in which virtual machines will converge to becoming just another content type. I know people here like to rend their garments and scream Javascript Delenda Est[0] into the void and just hope everything that happened to the web in the last 20 years just goes away, but the day is coming where all archived and obsolete code will have a URL endpoint that bootstraps a VM and runs it. The best the web of 1994 could do is file downloads, maybe Java applets and flash.
Sometimes the way people here seem to dismiss the modern web is baffling. I get it, but look at it from the point of view of the mainstream web user. The web offers access to so much more than would even have been possible in 1994, and lets people interact with one another on a much more direct and complex level.
Yes, the added richness and depth comes with a lot of baggage, but its undeniably there.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447851
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697520