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The Plate Archive41 charts

Life Online: Charts About the Internet, 2008–2010

The collection that dated fastest, and is therefore the most useful.

The charts in this collection were drawn by people describing a thing that had not settled down yet. In 2008 the internet was still a place you went to, on a computer, in a room, and the everyday friction of it — waiting for a download to finish, deciding whether a link was safe to click, being the fourth person to write “first” under a video — was novel enough that plotting it counted as an observation rather than a complaint.

That is why this is the collection that aged fastest and the one that turned out to be worth the most. Ninety-seven sites still link to it still point at these addresses, more than any other theme in the archive, and they come from an unusual mix: technology blogs, university IT departments, forum threads, and at least one piece of published journalism.

The browser charts

Four charts here are about which browser people used and why, and they are the closest thing in the archive to a primary source. Reasons for Using Internet Explorer from March 2009 divides its pie between reasons that are all some version of “it was already there”, and it was picked up by the Thai technology site Blognone and by Techrights, both of which were covering the European antitrust case about browser bundling at the time. Usage of Internet Explorer does the same job as a line. How To Make Google Chrome treats a browser as a recipe. Web Browser Cookies takes the one piece of browser terminology that sounds like food and refuses to let go of it.

Read together they record something the market-share graphs of the period do not: that browser choice in 2009 was mostly not a choice. The joke each chart makes depends on the reader already knowing that.

Comment sections, threads and the shape of an argument

The archive’s most-cited single chart is about comment sections, and this collection holds the rest of that vein. Thread Topic Flowchart takes the observation that every long forum thread ends up in the same three places and draws it as a decision tree with no exit. Internet Communities maps them against each other. Results of Misspelling or Grammatical Erriors on the Internet commits its own error in the title, which is either the whole joke or an accident that improved the chart.

There is a specific reason this material travelled. A chart about an argument is usable inside an argument, and several of these were linked from the middle of threads as a way of ending them. That is a different kind of circulation from a humour round-up, and it is why the sites linking here are so varied.

Spam, pop-ups and the friction that disappeared

Some of this is now archaeology. Time Spent When A Pop-Up Ad Comes Up assumes a browser that lets pop-ups through. What People Download From Limewire assumes Limewire. People who check the “I have read the Terms of Services” box assumes, correctly and permanently, that nobody does. Since I Began Responding To All Spam is a chart about a deliberate experiment in wasting your own time, and Intended Use of Spam when Purchased is a pun that only works because both meanings of the word were current at once.

Download speed vs. % done is the one everybody recognises: the bar that races to ninety percent and then stops. It plots an experience of network buffering that the technology has since hidden rather than fixed.

Facebook, before it was infrastructure

Three charts here treat Facebook as a curiosity: facebook wall activity, People who find you on Facebook, and Facebook Users with >500 “Friends”. None of them is critical in the way a 2016 chart about Facebook would be. They are charts about a social novelty, drawn by people who found the mechanics funny, and the absence of any suspicion in them is the most dated thing in the collection.

Charts here
41
Images recovered
26
Published as plates
9
Referring domains
97
First posted
Apr 2008
Last posted
Aug 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A2

    Actual Age of Men Who Claim to Be 29 Online

    · Drawn by Megan S

  2. A3

    A Practical look at the information age

    · Drawn by Bill Peck · image not recovered

  3. A4

    Web Development

    · Drawn by William W · 6 domains still link here · published as a plate

  4. A5

    Since I Began Responding To All Spam

    · Drawn by Calm Dog · image not recovered

  5. A6

    Thread Topic Flowchart

    · Drawn by Jay C

  6. A7

    facebook wall activity

    · Drawn by Ryan Carney

  7. A8

    Why People Write “First” in the Comments

    · Drawn by Daniel D · image not recovered

  8. A9

    Web Browser Cookies

    · Drawn by cookie monster · image not recovered

  9. A10

    People who find you on Facebook

    · Drawn by caseystay

  10. Side B
  11. B1

    Why People write “First” in the comments

    · Drawn by Erik · 10 domains still link here · published as a plate

  12. B2

    Online Gaming Players

    · Drawn by TheMerc · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  13. B3

    People you meet on the Web

    · Drawn by PING · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  14. B4

    Uses of Google

    · Drawn by JayThwack · 10 domains still link here · published as a plate

  15. B5

    Things I do when my internet connection is being slow

    · image not recovered

  16. B6

    Intended Use of Spam when Purchased

    · Drawn by ajax

  17. B7

    /b/

    · Drawn by genericusername · 2 domains still link here

  18. B8

    Reasons for using Internet Explorer

    · Drawn by Flo987 · 8 domains still link here · published as a plate

  19. B9

    Uses of Their/There/They’re By People 12-20 online

    · Drawn by crazycrayons · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  20. B10

    Blogs

    · Drawn by raiderrobert · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  21. Side C
  22. C1

    Results of Misspelling or Grammatical Erriors on the Internet

    · Drawn by Adfirmus

  23. C2

    Things to Do Without Access To The Internet

    · 2 domains still link here

  24. C3

    How people research things

    · Drawn by jeddycakes · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  25. C4

    People Who Email Me

    · Drawn by hobojo94

  26. C5

    Download speed vs. % done

    · image not recovered

  27. C6

    Operating Systems

    · 7 domains still link here · published as a plate

  28. C7

    Internet communities

    · Drawn by S

  29. C8

    Usage of Internet Explorer

    · Drawn by Ahtin · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  30. C9

    Time Spent When A Pop-Up Ad Comes Up

    · image not recovered

  31. C10

    What People Think When They See a Typo Online

  32. Side D
  33. D1

    What People Download From Limewire

    · Drawn by zeldario

  34. D2

    Lol texting

    · image not recovered

  35. D3

    People who check the “I have read the Terms of Services” box…

  36. D4

    What happens to me when I don’t send out chain messages

    · Drawn by jojocheese · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  37. D5

    Facebook Users with >500 “Friends”

    · Drawn by AC202 · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  38. D6

    Internet Needs

    · Drawn by Pleated Jeans · 2 domains still link here

  39. D7

    Typical website evolution

    · image not recovered

  40. D8

    Where will you be when you log off today?

    · Drawn by Joey Roth · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  41. D9

    How To Make Google Chrome

    · Drawn by JandN

  42. D10

    Our Secrets Revealed

  43. Side E
  44. E1

    Is It NSFW Or Really NSFW?

    · 5 domains still link here · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is in the Life Online collection?

Forty-one charts about using the internet, drawn between April 2008 and August 2010. Browsers, comment threads, spam, search, file sharing, Facebook, and the mechanics of being online at a time when all of that was still novel enough to be worth charting.

Why do so many of these charts hold external links?

Because they were about the industry that writes about itself. A chart about Internet Explorer gets posted to technology forums; a chart about comment sections gets cited by people writing about comment sections. This collection is linked from ninety-seven sites, more than any other theme in the archive.

Which chart in this collection travelled furthest?

Why People Write “First” in the Comments, from October 2008, which Slate cited and which still is linked from ten sites. It is published as its own plate rather than as an entry here.

Do the browser charts still make sense?

Better than they did at the time. A 2009 chart of reasons for using Internet Explorer reads now as a small piece of documentary evidence about corporate IT, which is not what it was drawn to be.

Why are some entries here without an image?

The original chart images were hosted on a service that now returns an error for every one of them, did not survive on its original host. Where no copy survived, the entry keeps its title, its date and its address rather than showing a substitute.