Definitions and Expectations; Killers at Large

Let’s “blog” like the Chef from the Muppets

It was sometime between the late 90s and early 2000s that I first started dabbling with this thing called “The Internet.” An avid reader and programmer as a child, discovering the web right as I hit my official adulthood seemed like a natural fit.

The words blog and weblog were at that point in their slow, muddy rise to consciousness where your father would have said web-hyphen-log, if he’d even heard of the word. In short, it was a wonderful time to spew random thoughts into the nearly empty void.

And that was really the fun part: the web was ‘small’ enough that although no-one was specifically listening to your conversation, at the same time everyone was pretty much in the same building, or at least in those Geocities apartments across the street. It wasn’t hard to randomly stumble across the same site from three disparate sources in the same day. It’s not that it was a small world, it’s that it was a small world.

So you could write and toss things into that void, safe in the knowledge that no-one was really paying attention. Yet on some level you thought they were, you hoped they were. Here are a bunch of other people who have a modem, a web browser, a PC, and probably some understanding of HTML. Like-minded people who don’t really want to read what you’ve written, but probably will anyway.

For some it was probably the voyeuristic — or at least vicarious — aspect of it, but for me it was the causal no pressure atmosphere of it all. There was a time on the Internet when if someone didn’t like something, they just moved on to the next hyperlink. You could have anonymous comments without spam filters or moderators and see mostly positive and congenial commentary therein. Strange I know, perhaps impossible to imagine.

But then the blogs came. We don’t know who monetized first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. When I say blogs in this context, I mean the self-aware blogs that knew they were blogs: not quite corporate marketing or personal brands yet, but certainly vehicles for conveying the presence of a person with whom you would already have some kind of affinity. Or at the least, generating that affinity as they generated revenue.

In retrospect, this was the turning point for me. It’s not that I think monetization is bad, but rather it’s an indication that the sea you’re swimming around in just became larger, and yet more crowded. The internet was no longer this thing where people had a modem and an ISP and a computer and probably knew HTML, the web was now this channel that people would get on.

And more people means less people who think and feel like me, which means more strange comments, spam, and less of the type of community that works for me. Again, this is said without judgment, merely as an observation.

I’m pretty sure I stopped blogging because I loathe that word, and also because the community changed and I no longer fitted into it.

Or more accurately, I was sure that no-one was reading what I was writing, and the web was now so vast that you could visit a hundred sites in a day and none of them would hyperlink to the same place, unless it was to Google.

The fastest way to kill something new and wild is to define it, and thereby put expectations on the people who would use it.

With thanks to Joanne McNeil and her piece: https://medium.com/message/tiny-letters-to-the-web-we-miss-6a695a6316c