As culture increasingly flourished on the Internet

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throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, culture increasingly looked like GIFs. GIFs became the first widely adopted computer art, the vernacular for the first-wave of Internet memes, and the way contemporary Internet users then expressed what we today might call our “personal brand.” If you click around a few personal pages from GeoCities, the first major platform that let individuals host their own websites (archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), you’ll see how early Internet users would select a series of decorative GIFs like clip-art to express their identities and interests in these emerging virtual spaces. GIFs served functional purposes, too—they were used as spacers to define different sections of a page, for instance. They were also an animated way to invite someone to take some desired action, such as send you an email or sign your guestbook. On forums, GIFs even became avatars and the visual representation of our “netizen” personas at a time when not everyone was comfortable using real names or photos online.


But in my mind, nothing captures the creative spirit of the early-Internet era quite like the rich “under construction” subgenre, which I’ve cataloged in my own personal GIF collection I began archiving color correction the pandemic using GifCities.

Due to easier-to-use hosting services and the relative ease of learning HTML essentials, the landscape of personal websites in the web 1.0 felt handmade and do-it-yourself. If you were working on a new website but it wasn’t quite done, you’d be prone to make the incomplete version live and highlight the pages that weren’t finished with a litany of GIFs themed around building physical infrastructure—think animated flaggers holding signs, jittery construction workers operating jackhammers, and dump trucks and the like.

The physical construction metaphor speaks to the collective sense then that the World Wide Web was a place we were engaged in making together. Dropping a few construction GIFs on your page was a way to indicate “hey, this is a work in progress”—and it was a continual reminder that this new medium was something we could all play some small role in shaping. I don’t want to indulge in undue nostalgia. The early web was a capitalist place built on the backs of government-funded networking systems that had become accessible to folks outside academic circles with the World Wide Web. Many of our current challenges have roots in decisions made during the early Internet days. But there is a lesson inherent in that era that a lot of us have forgotten, as the Internet has started to feel more like a generic shopping mall as opposed to the digital public square it’s always been mythologized as.