David Bowie's first website, 1995; via leontakesusoutside.com. As the internet became more interactive over 1995, it became a more attractive place for musicians to set up a web presence. David Bowie was one of the first to do this. On August 6, 1995, the domain www.davidbowie.com was registered on the World Wide...

Jeff Bezos showing off his new website Amazon.com, September 1995; via Seattle Times. At the beginning of 1995, the internet was still largely the domain of academic-minded geeks and Silicon Valley hippies. But the culture at large was increasingly taking notice of cyberspace. Throughout 1995, millions more people...

"I am part of the Rebel Alliance #FediverseForFreedom"; image by Andy Piper via Mastodon. Every time I come across someone I respect in the web world who is still posting on X (formally Twitter), I can't help but wince. There are even some indie web rock stars who still post to X. Lest that sound too judgmental,...

Cyberculture pioneer Alice Mary Hilton; background image: Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway (1995). If you search for “cyberculture” today in Wikipedia, you are re-directed to the page for “Internet culture” — which rightly indicates that the internet is now just a normal part of culture. But if you go back 30...

Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic in the 1995 movie. At the same time as tools like GeoCities emerged to help people create a home on the web, mainstream culture was beginning to colonize the internet. Three big budget movies were released in 1995 that had internet themes: the Keanu Reeves flick Johnny Mnemonic in...

Beverley Hills Internet in 1995, before being renamed GeoCities. By 1995, people had begun to create their own web pages on the World Wide Web — or “home pages” as they were called back then. Previously, home pages had typically been created by professional coders, or academics who had technical knowledge of the...

Netscape's mascot, Mozilla, in 1994; artist: Dave Titus. The World Wide Web was in its infancy as 1994 dawned. There were just 623 websites in the entire world at the beginning of the year. By June 1994, that figure had risen to 2,738 and by year's end it had tipped over 10,000. So the Web’s exponential growth began...

Tagged "Lana Del Rey" in Tumblr, November 2012; screenshot via Wayback Machine. When 20-year old David Karp launched Tumblr in February 2007, he positioned his new product as an easy-to-use alternative to traditional blogging software. The emphasis was on fun and sharing, rather than writing and editing. The name,...

Netscape browser, 1994; screenshot via YouTube. Netscape was founded in 1994 on the premise of bringing multimedia to the internet via a web browser. The initial focus was on managing basic multimedia elements — particularly images, but also sound — in an age of super slow modems. The burden of loading images was so...

IUMA's Jeff Patterson and Rob Lord; photo via Good Times. Although much of the interactive multimedia focus was on CD-ROMs during 1994, there were some multimedia experiments happening on the World Wide Web. Of particular note was a prototype online music service called the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA),...

Gangnam Style, the most popular YouTube video of 2012. If 2012 was the year that Web 2.0 quietly died, it was also when a new kind of internet was born: a more mobile and visual one, with images and videos leading the way. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram in April 2012 signalled that smartphone apps would become...

Lana Del Rey in Video Games, uploaded to YouTube in May 2011. On May 5, 2011, a little known musician named Lana Del Rey posted a video for her song Video Games to YouTube, describing it as "Hollywood Sad Core" and "Gangster Nancy Sinatra." It featured Del Rey lipsyncing into a webcam, interspersed with cultural...