懷念伴隨我們長大的互聯網
視點
作者：by Julie Beck
In sixth or seventh grade， my best friend and I were obsessed with a 1）fanfiction called The Fellowship of the Banana Peel. It was pretty much what it sounds like—a reimagining of The Lord of the Rings in which the One Ring is replaced by a banana peel. We printed it out and brought it to school in one of those pocketed paper folders， reading it to each other at lunch and between classes. An ongoing bit was that bananas made Elrond sick—“The smell 2）permeates everything，” I remember him saying sadly， repeatedly， throughout the time the Fellowship was at 3）Rivendell.
It was so stupid. It made us so happy. I can’t find it anywhere.
The Internet is a great facilitator of 4）nostalgia. It remembers the things you’ve forgotten， and with just a little prompting can usually hand you the thing your mind was 5）fumbling for—where do I know that actress from， or what’s that song that goes like “a chicka-cherry cola？”Instagram observes Throwback Thursday； 6）Spotify suggests songs that were popular when you were in high school； there’s a pair of websites whose entire reason for existence is to play a 24-hour stream of old 7）Nickelodeon or 8）Cartoon Network shows from the 90s and 2000s.
But when you grow up with the Internet， inevitably some of the things you’re nostalgic for come from the Internet itself. The popular app Timehop recognizes this， showing the user photos and social media posts from the same date in past years. It’s not so much my tweets from five years ago that I want to revisit， though. It’s watching Teen Girl Squad cartoons on Homestarrunner.com huddled around a screen in the high school computer lab； playing Text Twist and Bubble Spinner in the suite of my college dorm， the cultural touchstones that were as much a part of being young， for me， as listening to Dashboard Confessional and watching The O.C. （And now you know exactly how old I am.）
Those things are still just a Google away. But other relics of Internet past have slipped beyond reach， like the tale of a young hobbit and the smelly banana peel he is fated to carry into Mordor. “The Internet is forever，” they say， but that’s not always true. Websites come and go as the fortunes of companies rise and fall.
Take Quizilla， for example. It was the original bastion of “What Kind of X Are You？” online quizzes. And while people did visit the site to find out which Disney princess they were， Quizilla also became an unlikely home for fiction， fan and otherwise. The platform was not really conducive to storytelling—stories were often serialized in that people would post new quizzes for each chapter， which were usually one question long， with the “answer” just a bubble that said“click here.” Then you’d click “Go，” and end up on a results page that might be more of the story， or might be nothing， to the best of my recollection.