Just close your eyes to hear the noise. A series of shrill beeps that preceded connection to the internet. In 2004, the 56k modem was still the daily sound of millions of Internet users. Twenty years later, the tech landscape has changed so much that it’s hard to remember what we used. Some of our tools, our rituals, our digital addictions have evaporated, along with the 2010s. Little angels gone too soon, but who we won’t necessarily regret.
The noise you modem 56k
We start with him, obviously. This traumatized fax sound announcing the connection to the internet is one of the most powerful sonic markers of an entire generation. Ten seconds of crackling, and we were in the world of adults. Today, the fiber makes no noise. We gained speed, but we lost the physical sensation of connecting to something, and the phone line was inoperable.
Integrated CD and DVD players
He disappeared without ceremony. Apple killed it first, in 2008, with the MacBook Air. The others followed in the years that followed. We cried, then we stopped buying CDs. The optical drive, which was still a given in 2004, has become a purist accessory, reserved for convinced movie buffs and audiophiles. The kind of curiosity that you keep on hand to show off in the evening, praising the superior image quality and the fact that at least the film really belongs to you.
THE walkmans MP3
Apple abandoned its iPod in 2014, without announcement or speech. The MP3 player, the object of all desire in 2004, had already lost the battle against the smartphone a few years earlier. Today we carry entire libraries in our pocket, but nothing will replace the 256 MB USB keys that allowed you to listen to an entire album by your favorite artist in the schoolyard.
The physical keyboard of phones
BlackBerry popularized it, Nokia offered it in all its terminals. Physical typing, small clickable keys, the possibility of writing without looking at the screen. All this disappeared with the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 and the massive adoption of touch screens. A few attempts at rehabilitation followed, but none survived long enough to reverse the trend.
MSN Messenger
It deserves a special mention, not for its disappearance in 2013, but for what it represented: the first great social agora of geeks. Personalized statuses with misspelled song lyrics, late nights chatting until three in the morning, Wiz and emoticons sent for no good reason. Skype absorbed it, Teams replaced Skype, and social networks did the rest. But it must be admitted that the platform had its charm.
MySpace
Facebook killed MySpace with disconcerting efficiency. Before the Zuckerberg era, the network was the reference platform dedicated to independent music, profile customization (often catastrophic on an aesthetic level) and the discovery of artists. MySpace still technically exists, but no one goes there anymore. It’s the Pompeii of web 2.0: frozen in time, magnificent in its decay.
Les Skyblogs
This is undoubtedly the most French death on this list. Launched on December 17, 2002 by Pierre Bellanger, the platform rose to seventh place in the world among social networks in June 2008, with more than 21 million visitors. Three years later, it still boasted 33.5 million blogs and 4.5 billion comments, the almost exhaustive digital memory of a generation of French-speaking teenagers. The unreadable black backgrounds, the alt-1 nicknames, the autoplay playlists that made the browser slow down, the cryptic declarations of love to one’s favorite group with a lot of Blingee montages… All of this permanently disappeared on August 21, 2023 at midnight, caught up by American competition and the impossibility of complying with the GDPR. The BnF and the INA recovered more than 12 million blogs at the last minute between August and October 2023, archived for heritage purposes.
Video game booklets
They were illustrated, sometimes accompanied by cards or posters, and we read them in the car on the way home from the store to understand how to pass a difficult level and obtain a valuable cheat code. The dematerialization of video games and the arrival of competitive online made them obsolete even before a publisher made the official decision to delete them. The last major publisher to have produced it regularly, Nintendo, gradually abandoned the format over the 2010s.
Adobe Flash Player
It fueled online gaming sites, absurd animations, and much of the internet culture of the 2000s and 2010s. Steve Jobs condemned it in 2010 in a famous open letter. Adobe officially ended support on December 31, 2020. Thousands of small games, interactive experiences and videos now only exist in archives. The Internet Archive attempts to salvage what it can, with uneven results.
Google Reader
The death of Google Reader in 2013 is still seen by some as a crime against digital culture. Google killed it in the name of simplifying its product catalog. RSS feeds still exist, but their use has become considerably marginalized. Too bad, we loved spending hours there.
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