The romance of logging on (and what marketers can learn from it)

I recently saw this meme that talked about the concept of the internet as a "place."

You sat down at the family computer, waited your turn (because your sibling was hogging MSN), and listened to the otherworldly scream of dial-up as you connected. Once you were in, you were in another world. Chatrooms, Neopets, Myspace layouts, anonymous forums. A place with its own culture, rituals, and characters.

For the girls who remember playing myscene - you'd open up the website and it would take you through Madison or Kennedy's bedroom door, where you'd give the characters a makeover or go through outfit options.

Logging on was once an act of travel. A mini migration. You left your offline world behind and entered a digital one. And importantly, you could also

When you shut the laptop or got kicked off because someone needed the landline, the spell was broken, and you went back to playing in the garden or terrorising your siblings before dinner.

Fast-forward to now: the internet isn't a destination, it's an atmosphere. It's everywhere, all the time. You don't "go online." You just are. Constantly and chronically. And the collapse of that geography from "destination" to "atmosphere" has fundamentally changed the way we behave online.

When the internet was a place, it was playful.

You could slip into an avatar, a weird username, an alter ego. In fact, multiple of them. You could be one person in a gaming forum, another on LiveJournal, someone else entirely on MSN. It was a playground for experimentation.

Now, obviously, the internet is permanence. It's tethered to your actual identity, your job, your bank, your reputation. There's less space for play, more pressure to curate. Exist there.

That doesn't mean people stopped experimenting altogether. But the stakes are higher. The old internet had walls. You could climb over and log out. Now that the walls are gone, what you post bleeds into your "real life."

And that shift matters for marketers.

Because if you still think of the internet as a series of channels to broadcast through, you're missing the point. It's not a billboard. It's a habitat. Babe, we literally live here.

And like any habitat, it has rooms, vibes, and micro-ecosystems. That's why the nostalgia for old internet design keeps coming back: pixel fonts, lo-fi GIFs, Geocities aesthetics. It's not just a quirky visual trend. It's a deep craving for place. People miss digital spaces that feel bounded, intentional, and alive.

The smartest brands are already tuning into this. They don't randomly post into the atmosphere; they build rooms within it.

Discord servers where fans gather, not just to consume but to interact.

Fortnite collabs that function more like worlds than ads.

Nike's SNKRS drops and other ritualised, members-only events that feel like entering a secret club.

Even old-school email newsletters (wink wink) are making a comeback because they create a defined space in the chaos of the feed.

These work because they

Looking ahead, I feel like that's where the opportunity lies.

As the internet gets even more ambient, woven into our glasses, our earbuds, our cars, our fridges, people will crave boundaries. Doors to walk through. Distinct spaces. Moments that feel like "logging on" again, even if the tech is always-on.

The romance of logging on isn't gone. It just needs to be reimagined. Brands that figure out how to build that sense of place, not just noise, will be the ones that stick.

-Sophie Randell, Writer