The latest INC Longform publication Digital Desolation–Amateurs, Aesthetics and the Aging of Web’s Architecture by Tatjana Seitz should come with a disclaimer for 90’s web nostalgia. As historians abandon master narratives and other disciplines deny historical models of explanation, there has never been a more paradoxical topic than the vernacular web and the authenticity of 90’s web pages to revoke a historical narrative.
Tatjana’s extensive research of the history of web design determines the accessibility of amateur websites as ‘desolated objects in the digital.’ Tatjana analyses these ‘leftovers’ of web design, offering a detailed insight into the origins of the pop up alert, the header feature and the personalized soundtrack attached to the amateur websites of the 90’s. Tatjana refers to these features of the vernacular web as ‘grammars of action’ which allows us to measure the degree of transgression between the professional web design of today’s global network of likes, shares and comments with the authenticity of 90’s web design.
Is modern-day professional web design rooted in these naïve webpages? Tatjana Seitz multimedia rich longform is fully equipped to answer just this as the reader embarks on an interactive journey back to the fabrics of Web 1.0 through a kind of socio-technological analysis of digital artifacts and their relevance to the web induced generations of today.
About the author: Tatjana Seitz graduated in 2016 with a Digital Media and Culture Masters from the University of Warwick. Her interests span the intersection of economic, aesthetic and data driven concepts within the context of networked interfaces. Likewise, she is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to data interpretation and visualization.