One day I'm going to write a long essay about the Internet Wayback Machine. Amazing creation, and you can learn a lot from it.

One of my favorite things is comparing mid-2000s web design to now. (L) is Yahoo in June 2002. (R) is Yahoo today. Web design has evolved from making everything easy to find, to making certain things impossible to avoid.

I think this is a very important technological shift for culture. As the internet has become more available, it has become more visually (=epistemologically) invasive. It shoves things in your face and as a result your behavior is conditioned.

(L) is ESPN's page in summer 2004. (R) is ESPN today. The older design is all about navigation: giving the reader more and easier options to get what they need. The newer design is about dictating to the reader what they need to see.

In other words, until a few years ago web design reflected the internet's nature as a tool that we use for a specific purpose. We brought a preexisting agenda to our web use.

Today, web design assumes we are empty vessels coming to the Internet to be filled.

Revisiting this thread.

Here's an instructive example how a news website's design reflects its goals for the reader and the changing ethos of the Internet.

Left is 10/15/2004. Right is just a few minutes ago. What do you notice?

1) In 2004 the webpage was geared toward navigation. What you see are lots of links and menus, meant to help the reader find what they come looking for.

2) In 2020 the webpage determines what you are looking for through oversized images and lack of navigation.

3) In 2004 the USA Today logo is very prominent. In 2020 it has drastically shrunk...suggesting that the Internet's content has become muddled together, and readers ought not be reminded which outlet they're reading because they ought not care. 2020 is Internet of Distortion.

Here's a drastic example of how this change affected news sites.

Left is 10/15/2004. Right is just now. This extreme transformation suggests much more than updated aesthetics. It's quite clearly about taking choice away from the user.

Something worth considering carefully:

To what extent is our current climate of toxic polarization attributable not only to what Internet resources say, but *how* they say it? What if the crisis of public epistemology is really a crisis of techno-epistemological manipulation?