Back at the turn of the millenium, blogging was the way we shouted into the void. Democratized web publishing seemed radical. The act of editing in raw HTML and FTP’ing it up to some server, or running Radio Userland or some other bespoke script/code mashup to push unvarnished thought to a shared hosting account for all the world to see was a signal that you were part of the cyberspace revolution everybody promised in early Wired features. While it wasn’t the first “social media” — boards and chatrooms were — blogging was the beginning of something.
It has been 27 years since I first “blogged.” My first domain is long deceased, and much of the ephemera of my early blogs has been purged to /dev/null. Of course, the same is true of many of the publications that I worked for during that time and the things I wrote for them–good luck finding anything I wrote at Information Week, Government Computer News, Baseline Magazine, eWeek, TechTarget, Defense Systems, or anything before my first byline at Ars Technica. But blogging itself has blended into the rest of the online medium, and its early culture of “blog ring” intentional community has all but evaporated.
That’s partly because it was subsumed by mass social media and “microblogging”–Facebook and Twitter had a critical mass of people on them, and the conversation that had started in blog comment threads and loose federation moved into the for-profit platforms. Even your grandma was on Facebook. And all the Twitterati were posting what they had for lunch.
But while the dream of cyberspace was connecting with people globally and learning from each other, mass social media has become a toxic waste dump – full of disinformation, AI-generated attention grabbing and weaponized ignorance. Refugees from Elon’s X are looking to other platforms to regain some of the magic that Twitter appeared to have in the early days, but Mastodon is a fleet of volunteer pirate communities with a totally different vibe and BlueSky is still not at critical mass.
At least for now, mass social media seems to be dying – and in X’s case, it is dead to me.
So I’m doing what I’ve been thinking about doing since Elon carried the sink into Twitter – I’m taking back my platform. I have let this domain basically sit here for nearly 4 years, and have used it and other domains I’ve owned in the past to post long-format posts that I linked to from the other “social” platforms. Now, I’m going to use it as my primary posting place and self-syndicate it with links in an attempt to both keep control of my content and keep it out of the AI scraping hands of X and Meta.
Let’s see how it goes.
The Packet Rat 
3 responses to “Back to the blog: the death of mass social media”
This post not only gave me sharp NostalgiaPangs™ but also made me want to leap up out of my chair and shout a loud “fuck yeah!” But then I realized I’d just scare the cat and that didn’t seem to be a wise thing to do at the time.
You are absolutely right: the only thing to do at this point is to turn our collective backs to X and Meta and go back to controlling our own publishing platforms.
And it’s very possible to do. It makes we crazy to hear people say “but if I’m not on Facegram or Instabook I won’t know what’s going on with anyone I know!” Really? Amidst all the other communications channels you have access to you won’t be able to know what other people — especially the people that really matter in your life — are doing?
With the exception of a couple of spasms that lasted no more than a day or two, I have avoided all social media since about 2018 and can definitely say that I don’t feel like I’ve missed it at all. And I’m hardly a Luddite or a misanthrope or someone crippled with social anxiety…at one point back in the dot-bomb’ed days of the Internet I ran a blog that peaked at about 300,000 readers (Cool Tool of the Day, a name since appropriated by Wired’s Kevin Kelly, but that’s a story for another day).
So nice job, Mr. Rat! I hope that now you’ve decided to scurry up out of your lair again to escape the rising tide of misinformation (nice post on that, too, BTW) and other digimalarkey you can keep it up!
Viva la Blog!
I thought I left a comment about this yesterday, but apparently, it didn’t take. <sigh>
Anyhoo…to summarize what I thought I posted before, #fuckyeah, Sean Gallagher! The only way to put an end to the toxic waste dump that social media has become is to ditch it and take back the means of publication from the techbros and megacorps. It’s amazing how our frog got boiled. One day people who had something to say were blogging, and then POOF! All that’s gone, and we’re beholden to The Algorithm and being bamboozled by non-stop misinformation.
Upon some reflection after reading this post last night, I realized that the great Myth of Monetization™ is partially to blame. Blogging back in the day was shouting into the Void because those of us who did it had to shout it somewhere. Nobody — at least at first — thought about SEO and ad revenue and affiliate marketing links. Heck, I ran a blog that at one point had 300,000 readers and generated quotes that made it onto the back of software boxes and it never even occurred to me until three years in that I could actually get paid for doing something that I loved to do. When I finally did end up in some half-assed ad “network,” it actually kind of ruined it for me because all of a sudden it felt like a JOB rather than an outlet for my mid-to-late-20s geek rage/urge for validation.
About 10 years ago, I gave a presentation about social media at a legal conference focused on issues of adolescence. While I was doing my research for my preso I had a revelation that knocked me on my ass, a knocking from which I still haven’t recovered. My revelation — based on research into neurology, adolescent development, and observing what was happening in social media at the time — was this: humans are not evolutionarily prepared to deal with social media. We’ve evolved over the millennia for face-to-face communication. We get most of our communication cues nonverbally. We’re wired for synchronous, in-person exchanges of information. We’re socialized by the immediate “hey dude, that’s not cool” signals we receive from our friends in real time when we’re hanging out and say something that’s not cool. And we all need our own time to be alone and reflect and lick our wounds when the social stuff gets to be too much. We’re not wired to be surveilled 24/7 and live our lives on a global stage.
There’s also one other issue with social media: the privileging of the screen. For whatever reason — and if I can get a bit LitCrit for a moment, I’d refer to Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal — humans familiar with contemporary technology tend to consider what appears on a screen to be more real/more important than what doesn’t. It seems pretty obvious why the Boomers endlessly reposting BS on social media see things this way: they subconsciously (or even consciously) were trained by TV to see what’s on the screen as Truth. GenXers and, to some extent, Millennials, are similarly influenced as well, although we’d all deny it to our dying days. To those who are younger, the screen is where Real Life actually happens. What shows up on their screens may not be the Truth, but it’s the Real, or at least as Real as anything can be.
So yeah. Fuck social media. Take back the blog!
Thanks for dropping this one in, Sean. We need to catch up at some point.