Farewell, Geocities

Last month, Geocities went offline. Its shutdown on October 26 prompted a wave of nostalgia - it seems like everyone who's been online for a while started out building or at least visiting Geocities pages back in the late 90s. But there wasn't really a sense of losing something, that I could tell. Geocities didn't fit in as well in the Web 2.0 world as the social networking sites we've all made profiles on, so Yahoo pulled the plug. That's it.

I had a succession of Geocities pages in middle and high school. I taught myself HTML and eventually created fairly elaborate (for a 14-year-old) websites. My interest waned in college, and now with Facebook and Livejournal and Twitter and Delicious and blogs, I have more outlets for online self-expression than I know what to do with. I won't miss having my Geocities page.

On the other hand, it's disorienting to see something I took for granted as a feature of my online world simply disappear. In 9th grade, we had to make "time capsules" to remind our future selves of our lives as high school freshmen, and one of the things I included was a sheet of paper with my Geocities URL hand-written on it. That, I was sure, would be there for me to look back on. I'll admit that I sabotaged my own message to the future by deleting, in a fit of identity reinvention around age 18, everything from my old website. But now every Geocities website is gone.

Sites like Internet Archive and Internet Archaeology seek to preserve relics of the internet's past, and they were especially enthusiastic about gathering as many remaining Geocities pages as they could between Yahoo's April announcement that it was closing and October. And counting digital creations as artifacts worthy of collecting, preservation and study is no longer a novel idea. Yet it seems like despite some attempts to archive Geocities, it vanished without a lot of fanfare... mostly, judging by tweets on the day it closed, because Geocities websites were not exactly paragons of coding and design skill. People might have been nostalgic, but they were also glad to see it go.

And yes, most Geocities pages were not anything amazing to look at. But they were things somebody created. They were amateur, enthusiastic attempts at self-expression - and maybe this is a stretch, but isn't that a possible definition of folk art, as well? Geocities was the internet's folk art, or maybe its folk code. In a way it's a shame that those pages aren't better preserved because although a lot of them might have been redundant eyesores in today's online world, a lot of them were also quirky and charming and spoke volumes about the people making them, just like the artifacts you can go see in any museum with a folk art collection.