A Return to the Digital Playground
A Return to the Digital Playground
Larissa Ophelia
This is me today, wanting to use the internet:
I open one website, and a paywall stops me in my tracks just as I’ve begun to dive into an interesting article. On another website, it’s a cookie pop-up that stops me—refusing to load the website until I either agree to the cookies, confirm my cookie choices, or reject all. When I click Reject All, I’m immediately booted off, returning to the previous paywalled site. And yet on another, there’s several pop-ups—video ads and “ADChoices” banners, and online store banners reading 50% OFF SUMMER SALE.
I click out. I don’t even remember what I wanted to find there anyway.
But no matter. There’s still social media.
Before I switch over to my phone, I click over to YouTube. There’s always something fun to be found there. And there is—at first. But after getting three unskippable ads in one 10-minute video, I feel myself getting frustrated and bored. Before I can decide to skip out, a YouTube short starts playing automatically, switching my feed to an endless Shorts scroll that feels overwhelmingly like TikTok. It’s too stimulating for me, so I take that as a cue to switch off my laptop.
But on my phone, the apps don’t fare much better.
On Instagram, there’s been another update—so now my home feed has been replaced with an endless scroll of loud Reels and posts from accounts I don’t follow. I still see posts from people I actually know—but the energy feels disconnected and hollow. Every time I post something, I’m met with silence and “seen by ___ people” notifications. Every time other people post and I engage with it, it gets swallowed up by the algorithmic void. When I go into the Explore page, it’s rife with sponsored posts and #ads that deliberately try to pretend they’re not ads. This feels more like a place to see and be seen, than engage.
Facebook doesn’t fare better; it’s an awkwardly barren feed of personal posts from high school classmates, and random posts from accounts I don’t follow. When I try to search for a specific Facebook Cat Lover’s group for fun, the Meta AI activates instead, immediately DM’ing me a list of Cat Foster Shelters in my city. Lovely.
Pinterest is fine, except every other pin is a sponsored ad from an online shop. The feed itself is also rather draining; I’m tempted to scroll on and on, gazing aimlessly at each Pin, but I know I’ll never reach the end. So I click out.
TikTok is…TikTok. I barely watch one video before I close out the app, overwhelmed by the noise and ads and chaos of it all.
In all, it’s been 45 minutes since I entered the internet. And already I’ve run out of things to do.
But it didn’t used to be like this.
###
My first memory of the internet is going on the computer at the big University library in my hometown, playing Javascript and Flash games on my favorite websites. And oh, there were many: 3DJoe dot com, LycosKidsZone, Shockwave, Nitrome…
These websites were a plethora of artistic expression—the sites themselves were vivid and colorful, with funky fonts and pixel blinkies that sometimes overwhelmed the page with sparkles and funny gifs. The games were also endearing—while they were never professional quality by any means, they were clearly made with a heart and passion that was palpable. It felt like peeking into someone’s personal digital arcade.
My internet tastes evolved as I got older. Geocities, a wonderful landscape of user-generated personal websites, became one of my main haunting grounds. My favorite Geocities were the anime fansites. I was big into shoujo anime, and the websites felt like a Sailor Moon page come to life: glittering rose gifs would dance coquettishly along each highlighted anime character, along with sparkling blinkies reading “moon princess” and “anime star.” With each swipe of my mouse, a cursor would trail sparkles across the page.
I loved it.
It was like peeking into someone’s digital diary. Instead of stickers and bright markers on a notebook, it was flashing rainbow fonts, colorful backgrounds, and endearingly hand-made web designs. It felt intimate too: each website had a guestbook, connecting everyone who visited.
In addition to Geocities were the internet forums: Angelfire and LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger. Open spaces for community building and digital scrapbooking.
Then there were the creative sites: Fanfiction.Net and ArchiveOfOurOwn and DeviantArt. And online virtual worlds like Runescape and IMVU and NeoPets. And finally, the earliest social media sites: Myspace and Tumblr, and early YouTube.
Vastly different websites, with a diverse range of interests. But the defining feature that connected them all together was this inherent sense of play.
In the early days of the internet, the world wide web was new, clunky, and still awkwardly cobbled together. But that meant it was novel, creative, and full of opportunities to explore. Very much like a playground.
###
When Facebook became a prominent entity on the internet, the vibes shifted considerably. Corporations started getting online, and the internet transformed from a decentralized cyberspace of play into this sanitized, homogenous conglomerate we experience now.
I personally feel like this coincided with the shift in our web habits. At some point, we all logged onto the internet one day and just….never logged off.
And I don’t just mean on our laptops—but our phones, our desktops, and (for some people) even our watches. The internet became less a place that we visited, played in, or tended to, and became more of a looming presence that constantly hovered at the edges of our peripheral.
It’s no wonder the language we used to discuss the internet morphed in kind. Instead of “surfing the web” or “browsing the internet” or even “tending to a lil cyber corner,” we are now “chronically online,” “doom-scrolling,” and “trapped” in various “hellsites.”
There seems to be no sense of community online anymore, only hierarchy: who is an influencer vs a consumer, which algorithm “rewards” or “punishes,” what makes us “shadowbanned” vs “visible.”
In the same vein, instead of exploring the web, we’re being pushed into a corner and “told” what we want to see; the algorithm feeds us hyper-specific topics and advertisements that keeps us in a never-ending loop, making it near impossible to leave our self-contained bubble.
Also interesting is the social landscape of the internet itself; one of the markers of the early internet that I personally appreciated was the ability to be anonymous, if one so chose. Not in the way we interpret anonymity now—no, now if someone’s “anon,” it’s usually to spread vitriol or troll an unsuspecting victim.
But in the early days of the internet, it was more like putting on a persona. An avatar in every sense of the word, to explore the different facets of our personalities. It wasn’t uncommon to have a nickname specifically used online for the various game sites, blogs, and communities you were a part of. You could connect with people—but on your own terms.
Now, everyone is on the internet. Not necessarily a bad thing on the surface—but I think the way we’ve approached it has made our boundaries porous.
Instead of navigating the web on your own terms, it now feels like we’re being constantly surveilled—which means we cannot show up as our full personalities or selves without fear—or at the very least, anxiety.
None of these things bode for a positive relationship to the internet.
###
In response to the modern iteration of the internet, I’ve seen a lot of conversations about disconnecting completely. On YouTube, there’s endless videos about leaving social media or the internet forever; on news sites there’s a new article every day about people switching over to flip phones or “dummy” phones. On Reddit there’s the r/NoSurf community that encourages people to get off the internet and stop their online addiction.
There’s even currently a Gen Z luddite movement championing pure analogue time over any time spent online.
These are all commendable initiatives with good intentions. But I personally feel like—just as with being chronically online—these mindsets lean too far into an extreme. Whether we like it or not, the internet is here to stay, and in order to navigate much of our current life, we have to be connected digitally one way or another.
So rather than resigning to being addicted to the internet or attempting to go full Luddite…why not instead try to strike a balance?
Easier said than done, I know—but I believe it can be done with both a change in mindset, and intentional action.
###
The most important way to reignite a sense of play on the internet is by, again, recognizing it as a place to visit, rather than live. We weren’t meant to be plugged in all the time—it not only overstimulates, but it dulls our senses, fatigues our brain. Having healthy digital breaks allows us to reset, refill our cups, and return to our digital space on our own terms, with a fresh mind.
We need to remember that part of the reason we visited the internet in its early days was for community; finding like-minded kindred spirits and engaging in safe collaborative spaces.
The modern internet is more populated than it's ever been before—there are currently over five billion internet users worldwide. With that in mind, why aren’t there more ways to community build?
Because we’ve forgotten how to, I think.
But that’s not an impossible problem to fix. After all, the things we enjoyed in the early days of the internet haven’t gone anywhere—they’ve just been hidden among all the superfluous stuff.
###
Are.Na is a website with a quiet, minimalist design. Each time I visit the site, I feel a soft sense of calm and ease. Not surprising—in many spaces, Are.Na has been deemed a digital garden of sorts: a community space where users can post their thoughts, curate boards for any topic of their choice, and share comments and links with other users. There’s so many interesting gems on Are.Na, and one of my favorite things about the site is how each post is hyperlinked to its original location—making it easy to fall down a rabbit hole of research and exploration, discovering new websites and digital gems along the way.
Another site I’ve fallen in love with recently is Neocities: the successor to the now defunct Geocities. Like with Geocities, users can create their own personal Neocities hosted website using HTML and user-generated interfaces. The result is a diverse ecosystem of personal websites and blogs with the most vibrant aesthetics.
Though there can be a bit of a learning curve for those who aren’t as coding inclined (speaking for myself here), there is so much fun and enrichment to be had in creating your own website. Every time I visit someone’s Neocities, I feel the same rush of joy and wonder that I did during Geocities’ heyday. I also find myself slowing down and being present as I click through each website; after all, I’m exploring other people’s digital diaries.
These two websites are just one of many digital playgrounds I’ve added to my personal compendium; there are many more that are thriving, and only growing more prominent. People hunger for digital connection and intention just as much as I do, and it’s been thrilling to see the ways we’ve incorporated these early internet sensibilities back into our browsing habits.
Another example has been Tumblr’s re-emergence. Though there were memes and jokes galore when Millennials deemed it “cool” again, there’s some truth to the sentiment. The website has retained many of its early interfaces, with a community-oriented feel that is starkly different from other current social media sites. Though it's not without its ads or wonky updates, the tone is much slower there, with a feed that encourages personal curation, rather than algorithm influencing. Most people on there are also anonymous, using nicknames, usernames, or monikers to interact—it’s endearing to see, and has felt like a safe space for the type of digital self-expression that used to be the norm a decade ago.
###
The internet has become a greige, corporatized space. However, in spite of that, there are still slivers of what it used to be, teeming underneath the surface. And each day, the slivers seem to shine brighter.
Just recently, Instagram announced that you could personalize your account by putting a song for your profile—very early Myspace coded. And communities like Mastodon and Discord have brought forth a resurgence of community-hosted digital forums. Even content-wise, there’s been a shift—audiences are craving slower content, intentional creativity, as well as free self-expression; social media sites like Cara and Pillowfort have sprung up in kind.
These are the budding roots of our new relationship to the internet—one that marries the collaborative and creative sensibilities of the early internet, with the innovation and technology of the new. Like gardeners, we must find these fledgling roots and nurture them upward, until they blossom back into the glorious digital playgrounds that ignited our imagination all those years ago.
I open one website, and a paywall stops me in my tracks just as I’ve begun to dive into an interesting article. On another website, it’s a cookie pop-up that stops me—refusing to load the website until I either agree to the cookies, confirm my cookie choices, or reject all. When I click Reject All, I’m immediately booted off, returning to the previous paywalled site. And yet on another, there’s several pop-ups—video ads and “ADChoices” banners, and online store banners reading 50% OFF SUMMER SALE.
I click out. I don’t even remember what I wanted to find there anyway.
But no matter. There’s still social media.
Before I switch over to my phone, I click over to YouTube. There’s always something fun to be found there. And there is—at first. But after getting three unskippable ads in one 10-minute video, I feel myself getting frustrated and bored. Before I can decide to skip out, a YouTube short starts playing automatically, switching my feed to an endless Shorts scroll that feels overwhelmingly like TikTok. It’s too stimulating for me, so I take that as a cue to switch off my laptop.
But on my phone, the apps don’t fare much better.
On Instagram, there’s been another update—so now my home feed has been replaced with an endless scroll of loud Reels and posts from accounts I don’t follow. I still see posts from people I actually know—but the energy feels disconnected and hollow. Every time I post something, I’m met with silence and “seen by ___ people” notifications. Every time other people post and I engage with it, it gets swallowed up by the algorithmic void. When I go into the Explore page, it’s rife with sponsored posts and #ads that deliberately try to pretend they’re not ads. This feels more like a place to see and be seen, than engage.
Facebook doesn’t fare better; it’s an awkwardly barren feed of personal posts from high school classmates, and random posts from accounts I don’t follow. When I try to search for a specific Facebook Cat Lover’s group for fun, the Meta AI activates instead, immediately DM’ing me a list of Cat Foster Shelters in my city. Lovely.
Pinterest is fine, except every other pin is a sponsored ad from an online shop. The feed itself is also rather draining; I’m tempted to scroll on and on, gazing aimlessly at each Pin, but I know I’ll never reach the end. So I click out.
TikTok is…TikTok. I barely watch one video before I close out the app, overwhelmed by the noise and ads and chaos of it all.
In all, it’s been 45 minutes since I entered the internet. And already I’ve run out of things to do.
But it didn’t used to be like this.
###
My first memory of the internet is going on the computer at the big University library in my hometown, playing Javascript and Flash games on my favorite websites. And oh, there were many: 3DJoe dot com, LycosKidsZone, Shockwave, Nitrome…
These websites were a plethora of artistic expression—the sites themselves were vivid and colorful, with funky fonts and pixel blinkies that sometimes overwhelmed the page with sparkles and funny gifs. The games were also endearing—while they were never professional quality by any means, they were clearly made with a heart and passion that was palpable. It felt like peeking into someone’s personal digital arcade.
My internet tastes evolved as I got older. Geocities, a wonderful landscape of user-generated personal websites, became one of my main haunting grounds. My favorite Geocities were the anime fansites. I was big into shoujo anime, and the websites felt like a Sailor Moon page come to life: glittering rose gifs would dance coquettishly along each highlighted anime character, along with sparkling blinkies reading “moon princess” and “anime star.” With each swipe of my mouse, a cursor would trail sparkles across the page.
I loved it.
It was like peeking into someone’s digital diary. Instead of stickers and bright markers on a notebook, it was flashing rainbow fonts, colorful backgrounds, and endearingly hand-made web designs. It felt intimate too: each website had a guestbook, connecting everyone who visited.
In addition to Geocities were the internet forums: Angelfire and LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger. Open spaces for community building and digital scrapbooking.
Then there were the creative sites: Fanfiction.Net and ArchiveOfOurOwn and DeviantArt. And online virtual worlds like Runescape and IMVU and NeoPets. And finally, the earliest social media sites: Myspace and Tumblr, and early YouTube.
Vastly different websites, with a diverse range of interests. But the defining feature that connected them all together was this inherent sense of play.
In the early days of the internet, the world wide web was new, clunky, and still awkwardly cobbled together. But that meant it was novel, creative, and full of opportunities to explore. Very much like a playground.
###
When Facebook became a prominent entity on the internet, the vibes shifted considerably. Corporations started getting online, and the internet transformed from a decentralized cyberspace of play into this sanitized, homogenous conglomerate we experience now.
I personally feel like this coincided with the shift in our web habits. At some point, we all logged onto the internet one day and just….never logged off.
And I don’t just mean on our laptops—but our phones, our desktops, and (for some people) even our watches. The internet became less a place that we visited, played in, or tended to, and became more of a looming presence that constantly hovered at the edges of our peripheral.
It’s no wonder the language we used to discuss the internet morphed in kind. Instead of “surfing the web” or “browsing the internet” or even “tending to a lil cyber corner,” we are now “chronically online,” “doom-scrolling,” and “trapped” in various “hellsites.”
There seems to be no sense of community online anymore, only hierarchy: who is an influencer vs a consumer, which algorithm “rewards” or “punishes,” what makes us “shadowbanned” vs “visible.”
In the same vein, instead of exploring the web, we’re being pushed into a corner and “told” what we want to see; the algorithm feeds us hyper-specific topics and advertisements that keeps us in a never-ending loop, making it near impossible to leave our self-contained bubble.
Also interesting is the social landscape of the internet itself; one of the markers of the early internet that I personally appreciated was the ability to be anonymous, if one so chose. Not in the way we interpret anonymity now—no, now if someone’s “anon,” it’s usually to spread vitriol or troll an unsuspecting victim.
But in the early days of the internet, it was more like putting on a persona. An avatar in every sense of the word, to explore the different facets of our personalities. It wasn’t uncommon to have a nickname specifically used online for the various game sites, blogs, and communities you were a part of. You could connect with people—but on your own terms.
Now, everyone is on the internet. Not necessarily a bad thing on the surface—but I think the way we’ve approached it has made our boundaries porous.
Instead of navigating the web on your own terms, it now feels like we’re being constantly surveilled—which means we cannot show up as our full personalities or selves without fear—or at the very least, anxiety.
None of these things bode for a positive relationship to the internet.
###
In response to the modern iteration of the internet, I’ve seen a lot of conversations about disconnecting completely. On YouTube, there’s endless videos about leaving social media or the internet forever; on news sites there’s a new article every day about people switching over to flip phones or “dummy” phones. On Reddit there’s the r/NoSurf community that encourages people to get off the internet and stop their online addiction.
There’s even currently a Gen Z luddite movement championing pure analogue time over any time spent online.
These are all commendable initiatives with good intentions. But I personally feel like—just as with being chronically online—these mindsets lean too far into an extreme. Whether we like it or not, the internet is here to stay, and in order to navigate much of our current life, we have to be connected digitally one way or another.
So rather than resigning to being addicted to the internet or attempting to go full Luddite…why not instead try to strike a balance?
Easier said than done, I know—but I believe it can be done with both a change in mindset, and intentional action.
###
The most important way to reignite a sense of play on the internet is by, again, recognizing it as a place to visit, rather than live. We weren’t meant to be plugged in all the time—it not only overstimulates, but it dulls our senses, fatigues our brain. Having healthy digital breaks allows us to reset, refill our cups, and return to our digital space on our own terms, with a fresh mind.
We need to remember that part of the reason we visited the internet in its early days was for community; finding like-minded kindred spirits and engaging in safe collaborative spaces.
The modern internet is more populated than it's ever been before—there are currently over five billion internet users worldwide. With that in mind, why aren’t there more ways to community build?
Because we’ve forgotten how to, I think.
But that’s not an impossible problem to fix. After all, the things we enjoyed in the early days of the internet haven’t gone anywhere—they’ve just been hidden among all the superfluous stuff.
###
Are.Na is a website with a quiet, minimalist design. Each time I visit the site, I feel a soft sense of calm and ease. Not surprising—in many spaces, Are.Na has been deemed a digital garden of sorts: a community space where users can post their thoughts, curate boards for any topic of their choice, and share comments and links with other users. There’s so many interesting gems on Are.Na, and one of my favorite things about the site is how each post is hyperlinked to its original location—making it easy to fall down a rabbit hole of research and exploration, discovering new websites and digital gems along the way.
Another site I’ve fallen in love with recently is Neocities: the successor to the now defunct Geocities. Like with Geocities, users can create their own personal Neocities hosted website using HTML and user-generated interfaces. The result is a diverse ecosystem of personal websites and blogs with the most vibrant aesthetics.
Though there can be a bit of a learning curve for those who aren’t as coding inclined (speaking for myself here), there is so much fun and enrichment to be had in creating your own website. Every time I visit someone’s Neocities, I feel the same rush of joy and wonder that I did during Geocities’ heyday. I also find myself slowing down and being present as I click through each website; after all, I’m exploring other people’s digital diaries.
These two websites are just one of many digital playgrounds I’ve added to my personal compendium; there are many more that are thriving, and only growing more prominent. People hunger for digital connection and intention just as much as I do, and it’s been thrilling to see the ways we’ve incorporated these early internet sensibilities back into our browsing habits.
Another example has been Tumblr’s re-emergence. Though there were memes and jokes galore when Millennials deemed it “cool” again, there’s some truth to the sentiment. The website has retained many of its early interfaces, with a community-oriented feel that is starkly different from other current social media sites. Though it's not without its ads or wonky updates, the tone is much slower there, with a feed that encourages personal curation, rather than algorithm influencing. Most people on there are also anonymous, using nicknames, usernames, or monikers to interact—it’s endearing to see, and has felt like a safe space for the type of digital self-expression that used to be the norm a decade ago.
###
The internet has become a greige, corporatized space. However, in spite of that, there are still slivers of what it used to be, teeming underneath the surface. And each day, the slivers seem to shine brighter.
Just recently, Instagram announced that you could personalize your account by putting a song for your profile—very early Myspace coded. And communities like Mastodon and Discord have brought forth a resurgence of community-hosted digital forums. Even content-wise, there’s been a shift—audiences are craving slower content, intentional creativity, as well as free self-expression; social media sites like Cara and Pillowfort have sprung up in kind.
These are the budding roots of our new relationship to the internet—one that marries the collaborative and creative sensibilities of the early internet, with the innovation and technology of the new. Like gardeners, we must find these fledgling roots and nurture them upward, until they blossom back into the glorious digital playgrounds that ignited our imagination all those years ago.