And the irony of that irony. . . .
There are a number of good thoughts here and a lot of confusion. Sander Huijsen, you have a good point but your technical history is a bit weak. That is not unusual and is not critical to what you are saying, I think, but it does open up the door for people to throw things at you. In an effort to be helpful I’ve found that understanding major paradigmatic change is best looked at as a spiral through a series of stages and not a straight line or an end product. From any position on the spiral you are in the same vicinity as at some point in the past but this is never the past repeating itself. This is easier said than thought but it is impotant.
The internet and the web and social media are all interrelated stages and include both social change and technical change. One continuous line of development is the movement from centralized information processing to decentralized and then back to centralized at a more individual level. The easiest way to understand that is as break up of information processing into components and then internetworking of those components back together at ever higher levels producing a planetary computing environment. This is the cloud and is quickly evolving into a planetary computer that appears to be individual for every user but is, of course, so tightly interconnected that data can be dealt with in its entirety. And that is big data, as it is called, and what gets sold and is so valuable.
This is so valuable to us that there is no going back. Just as expected information processing expectations means that we will never go back to individual, lightly networked computers. That world is gone except in very specialized settings, e.g. interstellar exploration for now or very secure research. The problem you are tackling is the problem of data security and privacy within the context of increasingly dense urban societies.
And that is the very difficult issue of human evolution. We have been on this path for some fifteen thousand years. From that perspective social media is a logical progression and moves human societies into the virtual realm. They are, after all, mental constructs hence the natural movement of the first fully exposed generation into that world. The only thing left will be the usual percentage of fringer hermits and such people and, at this stage, the older generations who will be able to make only partial conversion to the newer virtual planetary societies.
It’s interesting that you are looking for an older form of early social media, individually hosted blogs. email newsletters, and the Well or the early community bulletin boards. The interesting thing about this is that you are posing this on Medium that is one of the newest forms of exactly what you, I think, want. This is a planet wide, moderated community of artists, thinkers, writers and readers all of these roles increasingly interchangeable. With the advent of the Partnership program there is a more committed level that costs money but also pays. If you haven’t I would suggest you look at Steemit as it is another version of what seems to be developing here but is based on cryptocurrency/blockchain specific to that community. I would not be surprised to see Medium move in that direction at some point. These may well form the foundation for future virtual sovereign communities. But that is another topic.
Hopefully this was helpful in some way . . .
