Some theorists who study the evolution of the human brain believe that in order to understand the human drive to build atomic bombs, to philosophize and make art, we must consider the role of the hindbrain, the primitive mind that, the theory goes, understands only territory, mating and power. Similarly, to understand why Everquest and Ultima Online and the rest are the way they are, we must look back to the earliest MUDs and see how they bred cultures and conflicts that still exist today. The look of online art, the ways Internet users communicate with each other and the language in which they do it all have roots in the oldest Net cultures. But what's truly amazing is that those oldest, primordial Net cultures still exist. The history of the Net is alive and well.
Technology shapes society, but society is more lasting than technology.
And there still is. While even young children can create multimedia extravaganzas with a mouse click, there are still some Net users who laboriously assemble graphics of astounding complexity from the building blocks of words, not images. Granted, there are now tools to assist in the process, like Fabs or TheDraw Screen Editor, but the output is something that could have sprung from a line printer three or more decades ago. If the human hindbrain uses the forebrain as a means to its ends, so, too, has the primal art culture of the Net adopted new technologies. Modern alphabets began as representational images and slowly evolved into abstract symbols.