There was a time early in this new millennium when the internet was a much smaller place, and as a byproduct, an open landscape. This was the time when your personal anonymity mattered, and some of us went to great lengths to keep it that way. Back then, the idea of plastering your face all over the internet wasn’t commonplace, and social media was relegated to ICQ- and TELENT-protocol chat rooms.
That’s where I’m from.
Most of the early 2000s internet comprised of text. We just didn’t have the bandwidth for decent resolution images, let alone video. So, with over two decades of communicating online purely via prose (SMS-speak, emoji-speak and the like only really ballooned in the 2010s, and I confess I struggle to this day with smartphone predictive text input as well as grammatical and punctuation errors when using “DMs”), that’s the strongest part of my communication library.
A lot of communities sprang up in the form of Bulletin Boards and Forums, which have now transformed into Reddit (and to some extent, Discord), and I was around in a couple of them, including forums that spent a lot of time discussing:
- Post-modern fiction (built around Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves)
- Fringe movies from all around the world
- Photomanipulation
- Collaborative writing
- Electronic Music Production
And so on.
There were small-profile bloggers on platforms such as Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, and even some who self-hosted (Shamus Young) that had a loyal following of readers and commenters, and the internet was generally a place to go and do what you wanted as long as you found your community. And if you didn’t, you could make your own.
There was, for example, a blogger who chronicled the life and times of Darth Vader, and almost everyone from the English-speaking world will find a lot of good prose if they ever read his work; and that other blogger who visited haunted houses for the sheer joy of talking about them. A lot of this content was meticulously crafted and researched.
Then the social media bandwagon came along. Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, and eventually, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter and all the modern juggernauts. Today’s internet feels like a wide-open space, with many avenues to place your voice and your perspective and your creations out to the world. But it doesn’t feel as open, or receptive as it did in the 2000s.
There’s too much noise these days. You’re bombarded with “content” masquerading as advertisement platforms (or maybe it’s the other way around), the degree of investment in the creation doesn’t feel the same. It all feels manufactured to my eyes.
I was a part of the initial group of people who used the internet as a vehicle for making things. But the deluge of content creators that shaped this space through most of the past decade brought my gears to a grinding halt, until the Covid lockdown brought about a fresh deluge of people sitting and home fiddling with cameras and video editing software. It felt like a reset where the noise was magnified tenfold, but so did the receptors, the receivers, the audience.
This website, and this blog, is an attempt to get back into the groove of what I haven’t done in almost a decade. That’s the burden; to survive these 2020s in this saturated landscape without getting lost in the sea of likes, upvotes, downvotes, and all the +1s of the social media empire.
Because, in a very real sense, your online presence dictates your existence in today’s world. If it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.
I hope you’ll find something here that justifies this return.