Notes on public policy, politics, philosophy, music
2006 was such a long time ago, and not just as marked by the calendar.
That’s roughly the middle of an era — call it 2004 through 2008 — in which I did a lot of blogging. The internet was still relatively new, and the world wide web was even newer. Many people were online, but online life wasn’t nearly as big as it is now.
I had a lot of optimism about the value of the online world. For one thing, it paved the way for me to met a lot of people in person. Most of them were involved in this new form of publication called the blog — briefly, self-published websites, with articles organized in chronological order — either as writers or readers.
A small group us, perhaps a dozen or so, would met at a pub on any given Thursday evening. We would converse over food and drink, and we’d organize into teams of up to four people to compete against each other for a trivia contest. (The winners’ prize: free beer!) Most of us wrote about politics, so naturally the topic came up a lot in our conversations. But that wasn’t the only topic. Indeed, at least one marriage (which, by my latest count, has produced four children) resulted from our times together. And in addition to the weekly drop-in events, at least two or three times a year, a gregarious guy with a large body and larger presence would would organize a larger bash, and perhaps 50 people would show up. Good times.
I wrote blog entries. Lots of them. I wrote on my own website, and I wrote on the website of a major newspaper in the Midwest. Though the newspaper position didn’t pay out in currency (“paid in exposure” was still a thing), I did turn the experience into paid gigs. For example, for two or three years, I managed a group blog, with a budget for my own work as well as for a few people I selected. We were fighting off a certain political development. We were minor players, at best, and the development went forward. For some reason, I was able to continue working on the blog (and get paid for it) for another year.
Oh, somewhere in this time, probably a few years before, I was active on AOL. Remember that? I was a quasi-expert in finance, along with perhaps three dozen other people, for a financial services firm that gave us free AOL accounts. It all stopped when, I imagine, someone figured out that since few of us had the requisite government certifications, it might be argued that we were acting as unlicensed (read: illegally operating) financial advisers.
Facebook still had a fairly limited circulation. And then it grew. I signed up in 2008. For a while, it was new, exciting: Meet new people from around the country, or even the world! Find friends of friends without the awkward work of making small talk!
And then.
I won’t go through everything that happened since. It includes, though, the slow death of other online ways of communicating online, the development of FOMO (fear of missing out) and shortened attention spans, and the big sort of people into so-called communities. I think it’s a fair assessment to say that Facebook has contributed to the social and polarization of the country and to social isolation.
I’ve “unfollowed” some of my Facebook “friends.” (Some of my Facebook contacts are, indeed, friends. But let’s not cheapen the definition of the word “friend.”) Why? The posts I see from them seem to be all-politics, all the time. And not just politics, but, to put it nicely, complaints about “the other side.” Complaining. Fear-mongering.
It’s simply a weary slog to read through them all.
And for the stuff I do want to read? Facebook has, it appears, taken away my ability to organize when I see from whom. At least in the era of blogging, if I wanted to see what Sarah had to say about topic X, I could go to her blog. Today, I have no confidence that if I go to Sarah’s page on Facebook, I’ll see what she actually wrote.
So I’m starting this substack. Maybe I’ll write here every week. Maybe I can encourage a return to blogging. Or maybe it will account for nothing. I don’t know. But the possible returns, I think, make it worth a little experimentation.
What do you think? Is there hope for online communication or is it all a toxic soup?
In the meantime, tell your friends!