Fogeyism
It sometimes makes me a little sad, when I think of how much the Internet has changed since those frontier days when I used to make zany websites using just a few animated GIFs, hold long protracted conversations with all of my friends via email, and feel like I knew personally a decent sized chunk of all the people doing anything of interest on the Internet. A lot of this, I’m sure, it rose-tinted nostalgia and old-fogeyism, but all the same I do really miss my Internet, the one which existed before the whole thing became corporatized and sanitized. The one which I felt I could understand in its entirety.
Another example of this just hit me. In the old days, everyone used to respond to emails by quoting individual lines of the original and then responding point-by-point. I still do this sometimes, especially with people I’ve been conversing with since way-back-when, but more and more I find myself doing the bog-standard “type your reply and then leave the whole quoted conversation, however gargantuan and ugly, at the bottom” thing. Well, I foolishly just used the old-style replying method when sending a mail to a mailing list, and at the beginning of the email was, of course, a quote from the email I was replying to. So of course I am now bombarded with emails from people who think that the quoted lines are actually my own. Doh! I despair. I hate this constantly having to dumb-down in order to make myself understood.
Update: yes, I was in rather a pointlessly prickly mood when I wrote that.