Other than being a hilarious trip back into the very womb of the web, this video, made in 1993, allows us to get some perspective on how the web has changed since its beginnings as a glorified instant messaging service to a platform for applications, information and entire industries.

Here are a few footnotes.

A Series Of Tubes

John Allen’s Internet was a cute little town, where everyone met at the local grocery to talk about Old Man Mason’s cat’s new litter. Our Internet is a Metropolis filled nameless, faceless urbanites trying desperately to win back the simplicity of small town life. Too accomplish this we throw up little fiefdoms in the form of social networks and social media. Concepts that existed without programming about 14 years ago.

Urban sprawl has settled onto our Internet. Take a look at John’s quaint assertions about the purity of the web. “There is not a lot of cursing…” he says and then goes on to describe a system where everyone behaved and played fair. Anyone who has ever visited a message bored knows that this is a far cry from the web today.

The difference is scale. With tens of millions of people moving randomly across a disconnected landscape of sites and services, there is just no real motivation to be nice. There is always another town to loot, always another Forum to Troll.

We’ve also become jaded as to what should appear on the web. A court document appearing on the web raised all sorts of questions about law and ethics. These days, finding full transcripts of legal proceedings along with YouTube videos of the defendant’s committing the crime would seem normal enough. We have all become much more free with the what we do with our information.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I don’t have as poetic a conclusion as this news report, but I will say this. Maybe this new fangled web of ours isn’t so new at all. It’s just an Internet that has grown too big for itself trying to find that elusive “soul” that it once had. Almost every idea that has come out of “Web 2.0″ breaks down to bringing people back into the web, almost as if there was a time that they disappeared.

So watch the video and take a few minutes to chuckle at our digital ancestors, but remember in a few years time we’ll be right up there with them.