I've been considering a sort of "Year in review" post towards the end of December, which led to a trip down Blog Memory Lane. This post was originally written on December 23, 2015, and I think it is highly relevant to what has been on my mind recently.
I remember the night in 2002, sitting at my brand new Gateway
computer that was delivered weeks before in cow-printed cardboard boxes,
when I sat patiently through the dial-up cacophony before typing into
the search bar on my AOL homepage “online diary.” The internet, still in
its infancy, was a world I wasn’t familiar with, but trusted in my
naiveté that there was a website for everything. What I wanted was a
place to put my thoughts. What I ended up with was Diaryland.
I
had no idea that those simple steps that night by a starry-eyed n00b
would, in less than a decade, become dubbed weblogging, or as we know it
today, “blogging.” I was a part of the first group of people to sit
down to a blinking cursor and start putting my thoughts and activities
on a page where people could type in my chosen URL and reach, well, me. I
was a blogger before blogging was a word. But let me back up a bit.
Diaryland
wasn’t the only online diary site at the time. There were also sites
like Livejournal, Deadjournal, and for a blink-and-you-missed-it time
period, Scribble Journal. As the majority of my experience took place at
Diaryland, I can only speak to the community I witnessed there, but I
can say with absolute certainty that what the blogging pioneers did then
isn’t even close to what bloggers do now. Early bloggers wrote for
connections. We often wrote anonymously, prior to fancy things like
image hosting, rarely using our real names, but relying on that
invisibility to be our freedom to write the things that people just
don’t say in real life. In fact, I think that’s the shortest explanation
I can use to highlight the difference between then and now: people were
real. And in that brief voyeurism that reading other diaries allowed us to
see that, no matter how dark or how warped things were in our own
lives, we were never alone. It was that connection that allowed real
camaraderie to blossom in the early days of Diaryland, and I can
honestly say the people who read my diary knew me--the real me--better
than anyone in my day-to-day life.
The problem with
having experienced the halcyon days of blogging (in my most humble and
ancient of opinions) is that I know how good it can be. I know the way
that allowing yourself to become vulnerable to strangers can lead to
some of the most touching acts of human kindness. I know how satisfying
it was to write and connect in those days, and when I stand back and
look over these last 13 years I have been a blogger, I see that those
days, like Hammer pants and disco, are over.
Blogging
today seems more like an agenda than a form of catharsis. It’s a way for
people to further brands, sell products, promote their businesses, or
even worse, put up a façade that their lives are something other than
what they are. Blogging used to be about seeing to the heart of what was real
in people. Now it has become nothing more than a means to an end, and
that end is money. The connection with people has been severed and when I
read what is considered a blog today, I can’t escape the suspicion that
I’m nothing more than a "page view", or even worse, expected to buy
into the saccharine bullshit lines being fed to me. If I read the word
“curated” one more time…
Look, times change. I don't
begrudge people the right to be paid for something they create
for another person's consumption, but I am allowed to be a little
disappointed with the way this usage of the platform has bastardized
something I used to love dearly. I know things can’t stay the same way
forever, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. As the tide of
blogging shifted over the years, I tried to keep up. I tried to change
with the scene to stay a part of a hobby that I loved. I tested the
waters at Tumblr, and here at Blogger, writing like the bloggers do
now--talking less about my personal thoughts and experiences and more
about what I could "teach" people. I even went back to Diaryland for a
while a few years back, but it has become a ghost town, where all the
residents have abandoned their posts in favor of the dopamine avalanche
that is Facebook. I don’t fit in anywhere anymore, and the one place I
did fit in, everyone else has moved on. For years now I have been trying
to shave the sides off of my square peg to fit into the increasingly
rounder holes and all I got from it was frustration and loneliness.
Diaryland, for as cheesy as the name was (Andrew, darling, what were
you thinking?) was a place where magic happened. People would walk in 3
feet of snow, uphill, both ways, to reach through the screen and touch
the soul of someone else, and it was powerful. It was real. And it was
fun. This that passes for blogging today… It’s crap. It’s a cardboard
cut-out of what the early pioneers of online diarists built. It’s hollow
and empty compared to what I have experienced blogging could be. But
the pull of the almighty dollar is strong, and the fear that you could
be found out as a real human with hurts and failures, secrets and
dreams, well it’s a lot stronger than the need to have someone see you
for who you really are.
As I sit here at my computer,
my 7 year old HP desktop that works when it feels like it and flips me
the finger when it doesn't, on my ridiculously fast internet that
doesn’t make a peep when I click on the Firefox logo, I think back to
Diaryland and the early days. Blogging as I loved it is dead now, but
I'm not ready for the retirement home just yet. I can't relate to what
passes for blogs today, and I truly don't belong in this club anymore. I
have no need to create something with the intention of selling it, and I
don't believe that I have the writing skills or life wisdom that makes
putting up ads anything more than pick-pocketing. I just want to write
about my life, for my own catharsis, good and bad, and if I reach
people, I want it to be because they can relate, not because I'm trying
to build a brand. I can't see myself in what blogging has become, but I
can stick to what I know, and that's being myself for my own sake.
