back to blogging
feeling a change in the wind
“I don’t like social media.” It sounds very dramatic and possibly, to some, even inflammatory or judgemental. As for me, I find myself more and more broadly agreeing with the statement - but there is some nuance that the statement is too short and simple to convey. That’s what I want to talk about in this post.
I grew up alongside the mainstream adoption of the internet in rural north-east Scotland. For a lot of people my age, this means we missed out on a lot of earlier mailing list and BBS culture that may have been more prevalent in other places like the US; by the time I and my friends were regularly online, it was the early 2000s. Most of us still used dial-up at home (although DSL was available for families with a bit more money), and at school or libraries, we could sometimes get a T1 connection (but of course, shared it with a large number of people). So, my first experiences of a social internet were limited at first to Neopets, email, and direct instant messaging.
It wouldn’t be long, however, until I came across forums. The first forums that I actually actively posted in were the Team17 Worms forums; I was obsessed with the games as a kid, especially Worms: Armageddon, because of the ability to create your own maps very simply using images or the built-in island drawing tools. I used to make maps, make missions, and scribble little comics in my school workbooks. Discovering that there was an entire community of people out there doing the same things (and who had been doing these things for many years already) was fascinating and I immediately felt some kinship. In addition, a large portion of the userbase was from the UK; timezones matched up, there were common cultural touchpoints that I couldn’t always get elsewhere, and it meant that I was able to occasionally even play a game of Worms with the people I was talking to. At that age, I wouldn’t have been allowed to stay up late enough on the home computer after school to play with anyone in, say, the US, so this was revolutionary on its own for me. This was social media, but in a direct sense. A medium in which social interactions could take place; more of a place than a format.
It was a small-ish place, so I came to know quite well many of the active posters by their usernames, avatars, signatures, typing styles, personalities, and other little personal quirks. Aside from Worms-related content, there were general discussion and video game discussion areas. I discovered Dwarf Fortress and Garry’s Mod through threads on the videogame boards, both of which irreversably changed me and how I viewed video games in multiple ways. I discovered MS Paint Adventures (at that time, Problem Sleuth had just started) through the webcomics thread, discovered Firefox, compared notes on films. There was even a tiny sub-community of people learning to make their own games and modding the Worms games starting there too. I got involved in at least one large-scale modding project, and played god knows how many tiny fragmented demos of things people had begun to build.
Of course, it was an online space in the 2000s, so it definitely was far from idyllic or perfect. There was plenty of ableist, sexist, homophobic, and thinly-veiled racist language used mostly by impressionable, idiot teenagers and shit-stirrers. There was at least very active moderation from the Team17 community management staff, so most egregious examples would be removed quickly, and forums drama wouldn’t get too far out of hand. This made a big difference as-compared to other forums without paid moderation teams. But, as I say, it wasn’t perfect - though there was a moderation team, that team was composed largely of able-bodied straight white men (and let’s not forget the Worms’ games penchant for “"”funny accents””” in the worms’ voices).
Despite its flaws though, it was my first internet home. It would be where I heard news about new movies, games, blogs, and music, where I shared programming tips with other beginners, and where I started to interact with people far outside my physical social circle, exposing me to far more diversity of thought and personhood than could be otherwise found in rural north-east Scotland. As I grew older, and learned more, and began to move through my teen years, I learned how better to interact with people, spoke to them on more personal levels in IRC rooms and on MSN, learned more about the vastness of the world and the different ways people could Be and Exist, started to question my biases, and just became a better person, through the care and attention of others. It was a place that for years, many people gathered in one place online to talk to eachother, to make friends, to learn. Of course, I joined other forums, to discuss other things and see other people. But nothing ever felt quite as comfortable as circling back to see those familiar names, and over time some of the more mean-spirited troublemakers had moved on. It had grown a litte smaller, but was a welcome place to start a day online.
Then, one day, Team17 replaced the forums with a Facebook page.
Bang. Gone. Like a soap bubble, all that had been was Not.
A place full of individuality and personality, replaced with a page like every other Facebook page, a place without usernames, a place without the ability to create topics for discussion; instead, you could only respond in linear comments to the content created by the company. This was no longer a social place. This was capital-S Social Media. A new age of the internet, where the relationship here was more like people writing letters in to a newspaper and less like discussing things with eachother in a room.
I’m not going to be hypocritical and claim that I never enjoyed social media, though. While I was never really into Facebook, I had already made a Twitter account in 2009 and followed many of my favourite posters from the forums there. The earlier days of Twitter had what I’d become familiar with; avatars, usernames, typing styles. The 140-character limit was restrictive though, and choked out the ability to express more complex thought without resorting to a firehose of tweets. Before threading, this was a nightmare for timelines, so people avoided doing it and would instead link to their blog (usually hosted on Blogspot or Wordpress, but plenty of people with the know-how had their own sites too). I found common cause with game developers, and as I went to University and started to grow up I found a lot of value in keeping up with news there.
But like a wound, it had already begun to fester, even early on; I had to start muting and blocking people who would just spout incessant gouting volumes of hatred, mute people who would insert themselves into every discussion, start seeing reply guys, subtweets, quote tweets, pile-ons. And like a frog in increasingly uncomfortably hot water, I would scroll and scroll and scroll and it absolutely destroyed my brain. My attention span got worse. I couldn’t read long-form texts without getting bored in the middle. I didn’t quite get addicted to seeing numbers go up on my posts, and never truly had the heart of a Poster, but I did use the site to try and gain validation for my work. Any time I made anything, I would spend about 50% of the time taking screenshots and videos “for the tweets” just in case.
It was unhealthy, and poisonous. It didn’t lift me up. Sure, it expanded my worldview; it gave me more language for social justice, it helped me better understand others and myself genderwise, but in short fragments. I had to engage with the people behind the tweets to really make anything of it, and that was done the way it had been done before; direct messages, blog posts, engaging with their work, their creations, their art and music. The things we had anyway, before Twitter!
And then, of course, the various creeping poisons built up in it to a point I could hardly bear. Brexit, the 2017 UK general election, the US presidential race… each one of these events further and further drew me into a spiral of obsessively checking the news, despairing at the news, raging at the inequalities of the world, and then returning defeated and exhausted to once again scroll my timeline. I felt ill; I felt dead inside. Any joy I had in logging on was quickly replaced with dread, but a kind of insidious life-sucking compulsion to look anyway. The hooks of the attention economy would rend my flesh each and every day. And soon, due to the pandemic, I found myself confronted with my own thoughts more than usual. More time to myself. And I realised, it was killing me; the obsession was too big. And seeing the way Twitter was circling the drain, even pre-Musk-acquisition, I decided to reduce it. I put timers on my phone. I pushed back. I cut it out, piece by piece. It was hard, and it was harder still without distractions during the isolation of the pandemic, and I would slip up and go on a scrolling binge from time to time.
But there were alternatives, and I found comfort in blogs again. In 2022, cohost popped up; a website where people could post in a timeline, but there were no numbers on the likes and reposts. The driving gamification factor of the attention economy was stripped out of it, so I signed up and gave it a go. What I found there was a community of people desperately seeking the same kinds of engagements. It also wasn’t perfect; it was occasionally buggy, moderation was stretched extremely thin, people fought and bickered. But it felt more like those forums, all the way back, than anything else had. It got me back into reading longer form content. I started doing more offline hobbies. I found in myself potential for growth that I hadn’t been certain was still there; the exhaustion replaced by relaxation, by joy again.
Cohost, unfortunately, wasn’t long for the world. But it was a rehabilitating force. Blogs are popping up more and more here and there; people tired of what Social Media represents are leaving it for good. People are building with their own hands, speaking their own words. There are even people making spirited attempts at building new forums, although personally I don’t quite gel with the Discourse forums platform that a lot of folks use. Too much flat design and not enough personality, but it feels now more realistic than ever to imagine people building new, personalizable online social places again, rejecting the dogma of the advertiser, the slick corporate-forward image that Web 2.0 began. But until that time arrives, the Blog is back.
And I couldn’t be happier.
