“A History of Internet Art” Reading Response

To be entirely honest, I don’t know how I could summarize this article. Maybe it’s because I’m dyslexic, but it seemed like the article jumped from one topic to another every couple sentences. Although, I suppose it is essentially a recap of notable and radical websites that emerged in the early years of the internet in the 90’s.

The article discusses web.art and all of the loose implications surrounding it, which is a medium of art which somehow even further blurs the lines of what “art” is in the first place. Websites like the Cyberfeminist Manifesto stand out to me. Deep Throat rendered in ASCII characters also stands out to me. All reading this article did for me was truly remind me of how weird people are.

One thing that bothered me is when the author talks about how name.space was implemented in order to prevent monopolization of domain names, which I honestly think is a bit of a kooky idea. For example, we already have youtube.com. Does anyone really care to make their own youtube.net or youtube.co.uk? No. No one does. I can see how .net, .com, or .org can be useful to identify what kind of website it’s going to be, but even this doesn’t really matter. And regardless of changing the tag at the end of the url, people still monopolized the internet. Google, Facebook, and Amazon basically own us all, and its not because they took google.com, google.net, google.org, and google.me. That has nothing to do with it.