The Machine: How Old Internet Concepts Shape Today's Digital World

Old Internet Technologies and What They Have Done For Today's Internet: RSS and Social Bookmarking

RSS feeds and social bookmarking pages are Internet technologies that may have faded into obscurity over the past couple of decades but have left a tangible mark on the growth of today's digital world. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) based technology incorporated into some news sites, social media platforms, blogs, and podcasts. Instead of manually searching each site for new content every day, an RSS feed can be provided to a user's RSS reader.  The RSS icon used to subscribe for the feed is usually a sideways Wi-Fi symbol on an orange background.

Once you click on the button, most sites will direct you to a page with XML. Then, you just need to copy the link of that page and paste it into a reader or aggregator that organizes all the new content from your subscribed sites. This way, you can easily access new content on a centralized platform.

RSS feeds have faded into the background over the years, due to social media platforms supplanting the need for secondary software to create personalized news feeds. Social media became like the RSS feed - with subscribe options available - but with control over what you see also turned over to major companies employing targeted advertising and user data collection. RSS readers are still around, but social media has dominated.

A similar fate befell social bookmarking. That particular technology was about cataloging the web with bookmarks, essentially creating lists of saved websites that people wanted to return to and reference. These social bookmarking sites were somewhat similar to information forums like Reddit. People could share lists of links in an organized file-type system with others using the same social bookmarking site, just as someone could post and share content with their friends on Reddit. However, just like RSS feeds, social bookmarking has been steadily replaced by bigger, more centralized forums and social media platforms owned by large companies. Today's smartphone apps like Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram are evolved forms of these old technologies. No longer do we possess mainstream individual sites to share and read information; instead, we have social networking platforms, each with vast applications in the information sector. The modern web is made up of these platforms, owned and controlled by vast corporations and operated with profit in mind.

Creative Commons

The idea of a free, open web where people could freely share information is an old one. Creative Commons (CC) is a license granted to free works available in the public domain, dictating that organizations and individuals may use such works freely if proper attribution is given (Creative Commons). Wikipedia is a prime example of what’s possible with Creative Commons, as its text is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. CC is, I think, a vital goal to push the Internet's information toward, as well as a pushback against companies that want to control information for profit. It circumvents the monetizing nature of much of controlled education on the web and puts information, whether it be creative or educational, out for everyone.

 The Machine

People use the Internet every day. We give it information, it performs tasks with that information, and it gives us results. And every time we use the "machine," the machine learns and does something with that knowledge. Michael Wesch's The Machine Is Us/ing Us video pushed this idea all the way back in 2008, before the eruption of commercial AI and machine learning became mainstream. Now that they have, machines are undoubtedly using us. Targeted advertising AIs, Alexa, the algorithms controlling facial recognition, chatbots, and many other intelligent programs that comprise the Internet are quite literally learning from every interaction we have with them—which is a lot of interaction. This video is 17 years old, yet it touches on the hopes (and fears) of what the devices we have created are capable of and what they will do with that capability. A prime example shown in the video is tags - humans assign tags to things they view on the internet- they may assign them for personal uses to organize their photography collections or for commercial uses to increase search results - or a thousand reasons in between - but the machine takes it all in and learns so many things based on those tags, including why we like them. 

In Conclusion

    The old concepts of the Internet have shaped the modern digital world. The desire to share information and connect with like-minded people runs through our social media platforms, forums, AIs, and the policies we put in place to protect the right to share and use free knowledge. Monetizing that information also became important. Looking back at the old technologies that made up the Internet is an excellent gauge of what the Internet has become: a collection of closed platforms versus the previous free-range and more self-controlled environment. These old technologies are not gone yet, so we can still search for alternatives to create a freer, more open web where we do the thinking. 

 

 References

Creative Commons. “Who We Are.” Creative Commons, 2025, creativecommons.org/mission/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.