My first introduction to the world of coding was through the MIT online coding community "Scratch," where children could learn to code with a visual interface. It allowed users to use visual nodes representing code in order to make animations, video games, and interactive stories. I discovered the site and played around in it for quite some time in elementary school, until I had a change of interests that led me down a more artistically skilled path. Now, in college, I return to the world of coding by creating and maintaining my Neocities website. This has allowed me to learn the valuable skill of coding while doing my part to help maintain the free and personal web.

The Free Web Versus Social Media

In the current age of the internet, large portions of internet traffic are through huge, shady social media websites, such as Instagram, X, and Facebook. These websites are the reason why the personal web has been cast to obsurity in favor of centralized, streamlined social media that connects people from around the globe. These services are free to use for the average person, but, in exchage for this low cost of use, the owners of these websites sell your personal data to advertisers and marketers in order to generate money.

Think of a social media website as a landlord, and the collective base of user accounts as all of the renters in an apartment complex. You can visit each individual apartment, which is to say, an individual's page, where you usually see a profile picture, their statuses, biographies, and so on. Before there was the age of these centralized social medias, people used web hosting sites such as GeoCities in order to put personalized content and webpages on the internet. The service ran from 1994 to 2009, until it was shut down as the internet started to gravitate towards early social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Social media became so widely popular because of the their ease of use and accessibility to those who either found coding to be tedious, or didn;t know how to code at all. It allowed people to have their own social page, to post their life events and interests, connect with friends, and communicate with people from around the globe, without having to spend any time at all learning any nerdy nonsense.

Soon after sites like GeoCities and MySpace fell out of fashion, social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SnapChat, and Instagram, started to gain global popularity, and the traffic on these sites makes up most internet traffic worldwide. To put it into perspective, there are 5.44 Billion people on the internet as of 2024, which is two-thirds of the entire world population. Most people are connected to the internet via social media and social networking sites.

In 2013, NeoCities was launched in order to revive the free-internet feel of GeoCities. Using this site allows a user to learn the basics of web development and create a fully customizable website for free (or $5 a month, to support the project towards an internet controlled by the world, and not a select few billionaires).

I am one of the few odd ones of my generation (Z), who takes a firm stance against social media sites. When people ask me if I use social media, and I reply, no, or that I quit social media entirely, I'm sure they assume it is because I am some sort of shrewd hermit with no friends and no life. This is, of course, a silly assumption. People have been able to, and will forever continue to, make and maintain friends and deep relationships long before the takeover of social media. Social media has only existed for a short blip in comparison to the length of humanity's existence, and it will soon fade into obsurity as other technologies have before. I believe the internet is a powerful tool that is here to stay the long run, but if humanity collectively realizes the harm social media does to the human psyche, we will abandon it in the pits of antiquity for our own good.

With the rise of social media has been a rise in global rates of mental illness and well as global phenomenons of misinformation, it's no wonder many so people are starting to see adverse affects to their mental health as a result of using social media. I myself have OCD. Checking and scrolling through Instagram became a compulsive habit that I have tried long and hard to quit, but the nature of it makes it addictive. I got obsessed with checking in on my friends, seeing how people's lives compared to mine, and for a long while, I struggled with feelings of loneliness and inadequacy, although I was supposely connected to the world. I used SnapChat for a short while, but deleted it the earliest on, as that platform was the first to make me realize how dangerous the scope of connecting with the entire world could be.

I have elected to get off of social media almost entirely, except to check some few groupchats or messages from individuals I cannot access any other way, and to create a Neocities website of my own to serve as a sort of archive of my journey. Social media use took up hours out of my days and weeks, and definitely had a large contribution to nervous and depressive habits I developed from my constant usage. 

Most of my hobbies, now, keep me off of the internet, for the most part, and I hardly like to use it for anything other than doing my coursework, writing, and doing research. I spend much of my free time reading, listening to music, painting, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my friends. This web-dev thing is a fairly new hobby. I'm still figuring out the ropes, but hopefully my progress is showing!