Remember what the web used to look like? I do. It used to have lots of weird elements like lines that ran horizontally across the page for no apparent reason:
Also, lots of animated GIFs:
And weird midi music.
All of this combined to make a series of extremely strange and nonsensical websites, including the cream of the crop, the pièce de résistance, and my personal favorite: Hampster [sic] Dance. This is what Hampster Dance used to look and sound like (CAUTION: if you are at work and cannot afford to make sounds on your computer, then you will be getting approximately 15% or less of the possible enjoyment from this site). It is incessant, inane, irritating, and idiotic. It is wonderful.
Here is what the original Hampster Dance URL looks like now: http://www.hampsterdance.com/
"The Original Home of Hampton and the Hampster!" When did this happen? There is a section of the site entitled "Music & Merch" where you can purchase How the Hampsters Saved Winter on DVD. And the available music is playable under a section entitled Fresh Hampster Tracks. I made it approximately twenty seconds into "Calling All Kids" before my head almost imploded in disgust. Here is what remains of the original site.
I'm not entirely certain why it's important to me that hampsterdance.com sold out. The generation immediately below me were essentially born into a world in which the Internet existed. My brother and people his age were starting college by the time the web was really taking off. I came of age with the Internet, and because I grew up with a fairly tech-savvy father, I watched it developed at the same time as I was learning how to use it. When it started, the Internet was a silly and fairly useless device. While it was being touted as "the information superhighway," it was mostly establishing itself as a place for chatrooms (remember those?), porn, and inanity. I made use of all three things, (my experience with the early years of Internet porn is a post for another time), but the inanity is the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart.
Hampster Dance represents to me a simpler time, when people were just beginning to learn the ways in which the Internet could connect us, and how we could delight in the inherent silliness of user-produced content. But the web changed, inevitably, and there has been much talk over the last five or so years of Web 2.0, which has made everything more interactive and collaborative, like a co-operative, as opposed to Web 1.0, which was more like a shopping mall. But I think it's been ignored that there was a brief state I will call Web 0.5, which was non-collaborative user-produced content made for no commercial value, and no other reason than to share and delight.
I suppose it's inevitable that this wouldn't last long, but I guess I found it shocking to discover what happened to it. If even the dancing hamsters can't make it without selling out, what hope do any of us have?
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