In what ways do you communicate online?

Blogging is how I communicate online.

The Golden Age of the Internet

I started my first blog when I was fourteen, on a website called freeopendiary. When I managed to get an invitation to join LiveJournal a few months later, I took the time to migrate each entry.

Those were peak internet days. There were opportunities for serendipitous encounters aplenty. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t sponsored. It was a discovery process.

Those first parasocial relationships were with internet folks that were cool. Legitimately. They posted poetry and used html to strike-through thoughts that they felt they shouldn’t share. They used spacing and italics to create writing that was punchy and beatnik. Their deep side parts showed only one side of their face in their overly contrasted black and white photos. Artsy. They weren’t trying to increase followers or make a career out of sharing themselves on the internet. They were a little weird to begin with, and that’s why we were all there.

Remember, before it was colonized by capitalists, the internet was for nerds. People who wanted to learn, discover, and figured out enough rudimentary code to share what they’d figured out thus far. Those who didn’t fit in IRL found their place, their people, through URL.

What you did on the internet was anonymous & private. I remember the first time someone mentioned what I posted on Facebook in person—I was caught off guard. By then I had been sharing myself on the internet for nearly a decade; the unwritten rule was that you commented where you saw it and kept it there. It allowed for the duality of who one is online versus who one is in person. To know someone online was to know a different, unspoken side of them.

This still holds true, yet the guise of attaching one’s birth name to their online interactions blurs that, it confuses people. To be in public is to be a persona, not a person. People are multidimensional, yet they can only represent themselves on a public forum as a caricature of the self.

Blogging is the only way we can reconnect to a better version of the internet.

For a fraction of the cost of what you’ve spent on targeted ad items or an impulse Amazon purchase, you can own real estate on the internet through a personal website.

People seem to forget this. They talk about “when internet was fun” like they can’t bring it back.

The Current State of the Internet

Our Mic Volume is Under the Thumbs of Oppressors

I guess those folks were cooler than me, that their introduction to regular web usage was around the time of Facebook. I don’t know, but I know TheFacebook as it once was won’t be coming back. Neither will Instagram. Meta is a conglomerate of media businesses that are relentless in pursuit of the bottom line.

Mark Zuckerberg is not a good guy. He’s a greedy, mid-life crisis billionaire with the psychological age of nineteen year old making life or death global decisions.

When media is chronological, it is equal opportunity. When it is based on an algorithm, it can be manipulated by the business owner to serve their interests, their bottom line. A website can prioritize posts of those who spend more hours on their website, who click advertisers more, or pay more to promote content. You’re playing their game and you’re enslaved by the rules they create, day to day.

X, formerly known as Twitter. Need I say more?

Our mic volume is controlled by guys that…suck.

(1/15/2025: Edited to add link to relevant video)

For centuries, artists have been arbiters of taste. They understood quality, they had the skills to craft something that was great and it gained traction because it was great. Not because it increased profit for shareholders, not because another platform was presenting video content or sending messages that self destructed in 24 hours. Great stuff got amplified by word of mouth. In today’s social media landscape, we have a filter of hoops it must go through before it can be accessed by many if any.

What is amplified by these platforms is sameness. In order for an algorithm to keep users locked in, it supplies content that is most related to that which has been seen before. Where is room for innovative, interesting?

These products are not good quality.

I know quality. My husband likes to do blind taste tests with me for expensive cheeses, olives, cuts of meat. I have a process at the thrift shop where I graze my fingers over the clothes and grab, always picking up a high-dollar item like J. Crew or Brooks Brothers.

The reason why today’s version of the internet isn’t fun is because we’re expecting websites to continue to do what they promised. There was a product that served a niche. It was good. This product grew exponentially and added features that blurred the product’s identity, then removed limitations that added to the initial allure. These websites are midlife crises product-ified. Business leaders keep adding bells and whistles, so that these products can be one-stop-shops, but it blurs the type of content for it and ultimately muddled the culture within. And they present this alongside a despicable amount of ads, Ai generated content, and sponsored, low-quality crap.

We can turn back the clock

The internet can be fun again! What was interesting about those wild-west internet days was partially how you came across interesting content. People talked about what they saw online in person because it left a lingering impression. They gave themselves time to think about it afterward, instead of watching another 30 or so videos directly afterward. They couldn’t, the connection wasn’t fast enough.

Users engaged with the internet like a hike, like a meandered discovery. Now it’s like a rat in a cage with an injection button. More of that! More! More!

We have to stop depending on corporations to facilitate our communication with a network that we earned IRL. We have to stop working for free to create content that sustains these corporations.

These businesses have nothing without the upper hand of being the thingthateveryonehas, they have nothing without their users, yet their users are the least of their concern. Peasants in the middle ages had no choice but to be subservient to the monarchy. This day and age, we are complicit. It’s only a few bucks a year to hold the deed to your own online microphone. What’s stopping you?