The proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook.  Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their design, such as the comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.

Instead of people being treated like the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not A Gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

The quote's on pp. 16.  I'm guessing that if you're a youngster you might say, What's this weird old dreadlocked dude talking about? Or, if you're an older fart, maybe in particular you are this older fart, typing this entry, who once concentrated on projects of proud extroversion in an earlier wave of web culture, you think, What am I doing?

Long ago, and far away, in a land before the blog...

And while I'm here...