One of the reasons I dislike when people say, with great alarm, “I miss the old days of blogging” and sadness that, “Nobody blogs anymore” is that they’re just sad for no reason.
They’re lamenting the fact that people’s behaviour has changed over time. It’s pointless nostalgia.
@SimonWoods It's still as easy to blog as it ever was. I think many people just migrated to Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, newsletters, other media that scratched the itch better for them.
@SimonWoods I agree. I think it’s less the fact that people don’t blog anymore and more that most people never blogged to begin with in the early days of the Internet. Also, technically social media posts is microblogging. So in a certain sense more people are blogging than ever before—just not the way some of us want them to.
@SimonWoods @JMaxB @uncertainquark
When I think back to the early web of 2000ish the nostalgia arises from an awareness that something special was being created. The internet seemed smaller and more intimate. There was an excitement and a sense that it was being built, co-created by all of us in disparate places, reaching out to one another. Connection, creation and the unknown potential of this new space that felt lived in by real people.
Our early web felt like a makerspace populated by people and we were aware that it was a creative space not yet dominated by profit seeking. Strangely, it was a digital space that felt personal where we could explore the unknown potential of a different way of connecting and being together. And it felt like a free space that was not tainted by constant profit seeking.
Here we are, 22 years later and the early days of creating something that felt important and intimate have transformed into "social media" which has become the very opposite. The new shared reality is that this corporate social media is defined by an onslaught of profit seeking via ads, tracking, privacy invasion all served up with a steady stream of misinformation served to us by algorithmic timelines designed to keep us emotionally engaged and clicking.
In short, today's web feels like the opposite of what we hoped for.
@Denny @SimonWoods @JMaxB @uncertainquark Couldn’t agree more with any of this. As we’re seeing with most facets of society, greed and profit seeking are perniciously ruining everything.