So Random

Reading response to Jenny Odell, How To Internet

Tbh with the context set by the first two articles (even though it’s been a few days since I binge-read them, and I even participated in a game jam in between), it’s much easier to understand the discussion about Web 1.0 and the author’s perspective in this piece.

The reading opens with a reflection on those VHS-era videos meant to “introduce” novices to going online. Their tone is invariably sunny: the internet is heralded as an “information superhighway” you can hop onto with a PC, right from your living room. This metaphor of a highway feels quaint now, especially when you consider how seamlessly the internet lives in our pockets, but back then it signaled a frontier. Tapping into a chat room or “surfing” from webpage to webpage was framed as a sort of expedition.

Yet these VHS relics also reveal a subtle innocence. We see their wide eyed optimism about “telecommuting” and “home offices.” One video’s pitch was that you could lounge in pajamas, coffee in hand, to do your work. Of course, we can’t help but notice how that dream materialized in complicated ways—always-on digital labor, the gig economy, and working from home while toggling between Slack and email at all hours. It’s the same technology, but the real-world implications have grown unwieldy.

I love how the author highlights the efforts those older tapes made to make “surfing the web” look dynamically exciting. We’re shown fast zoom-ins on pixelated screens, swirling 3D logos, and energetic surf music. The actual physical act of clicking around a static monitor obviously can’t rival real surfing, so the directors tried to compensate with flashy editing. This playful mismatch between real life (staring at a CRT screen) and on-screen illusions (faux-waves, high-tempo music) underscores how new and unpredictable the internet once felt.

It’s telling that back then, we “visited” web pages, wrote in “guestbooks,” and carefully curated each piece of text or image on our site. That sense of “place,” of traveling to distinct pockets of the web, has shifted today into frictionless scrolling and algorithmic feeds.

Learning Everything Else (on the Internet)

One of my favorite parts in this reading is the pivot: eventually, we didn’t need “how to internet” videos anymore. the internet became the place you turned for every other kind of how-to.

In the earlier days, those personal, amateur videos had a charmingly raw authenticity: people younger than you, filming from a messy bedroom, telling you how to fix your phone or master an eyeshadow look. Nowadays, many of those same search results return glossier, sponsor-driven content. The reading calls this the “sponsored how-to,” in which the folks are still in their bedrooms, only now the lighting is cinematic, the editing is crisp, and product placements float in the corner. As the author notes, it’s a microcosm of the entire trajectory of online culture: personal experiments get seized upon by business, polished and repackaged until that raw, spontaneous flavor goes missing.

Real People, Real Encounters

The 1980 art installation “Hole in Space” linked two distant storefronts via a live video feed, letting strangers in New York and LA stand face-to-face across a digital window. The same idea resurfaces in the examples of IMG XXXX videos or the now-defunct Rando photo-sharing app. Instead of curated, captioned, or posed content, these platforms delivered weird, context-free glimpses into other people’s everyday lives: a bored child singing, a random woman walking down a sidewalk, a pair of friends caught mid-laughter. They’re flawed, unedited, and oddly mesmerizing. In many ways they echo the wonder of “Hole in Space” offering pure encounters with total strangers.

Second Life and the Shifting Nature of Connection

The discussion of Second Life, where the author roams as a polka-dotted avatar, meets a glowing skeleton from Russia, and strikes up a conversation through a translator, perfectly illustrates the internet’s capacity for chance encounters. It harks back to an earlier dream of “meeting people far away” that those 90s VHS tapes promised. But it also shows how ephemeral these connections can be. Virtual locales vanish, servers shut down, and ironically, although the technology is extraordinary, you’re often alone in a half-empty digital world.

I’ve often found similar connections through Discord servers, where groups of people gather around a shared game, a hobby, or a fandom. For example, I’m part of a generative art (not gen-ai) server, and it’s astonishing how quickly people form tight knit bonds there, exchanging knowledge, inside jokes, and personal stories. Because these platforms revolve around a very specific interest, the sense of subculture emerges rapidly. We invent our own slang, celebrate shared memes, and organize long calls or group activities. It echoes the spirit of early Second Life meetups: a random mix of strangers bonding over an unusual niche, forging genuine friendships in the process. That subculture aspect, in fact, is what keeps people coming back day after day, just as some older Second Life communities thrive on their uniqueness.

More Randomness, More Strangers… But With Complications

Toward the end, there’s a reflection on how the early dream of random connectivity has crashed into modern reality. The author describes running into people with drastically different worldviews, so different that no amount of discussion or empathy can bridge the gap. The example of Angela Washko attempting an honest interview with “the web’s most infamous misogynist” underscores how the internet can also connect people who won’t (and perhaps can’t) reconcile their opposing beliefs.

Digital connectivity can bring you face-to-face with strangers (sometimes in brilliant or serendipitous ways), but it can also magnify and harden the worst ideas. The “train car” analogy where conversation with a stranger is forced by the physical space doesn’t map neatly onto online forums, where we can vanish the moment someone challenges us. Or worse, we can shout into an echo chamber of like-minded opinions.