I’ve been remembering all the different iterations of the internet I’ve lived on and participated in. My local library BBS. America Online. Geocities and Netscape and Yahoo and Forums and MySpace.
Somewhere along the way Facebook became ubiquitous. They won the social media wars and it felt like the only place to reach friends, share our art and our family’s growth, build community. I guess in a lot of ways, for us, it served its purpose. But in a lot of other ways it also broke the rest of the internet. It broke the sense of homegrown creativity and organic, interest-driven community that came with the “world wide web”. I don’t know about you, but I got used to being spoon-fed while I was there. In a pattern reminiscent of how I once played spider solitaire, I kept getting drawn back and scrolling just a little more.
Over the last few years I learned to temper my use of that website but it had my social patterns so maladjusted that I didn’t really properly compensate. I became more and more reclusive on- and off-line. Even when I went back, I was self-aware enough that I didn’t want to feed the thing so I hardly ever posted, or even interacted meaningfully with other people’s posts. Just kept scrolling like an addict.
Of course it got a lot shittier. I actually blamed myself and the way I used the platform for the changes I saw, and for a minute it actually made me start to interact with other posts more, or occasionally post myself. I told myself I was reaching out to my community and it was a step in the right direction, socially/emotionally. It didn’t change my experience as a user and it didn’t make me feel more socially engaged in any meaningful way.
My day-job is heavily social and it burns me out of interacting with people. It also continually reminds me how important it is to have our people to care for us, to build us up and to give us others to prioritize.
This last year has been… a lot. It has been a lot for the world. I have felt overwhelmed more often than I can say. I am also coming to understand my body and my brain in new ways, and learning to better support myself so that I can be a more active community member, in a check-on-your-friends kind of way. In a remembering to text back or even text first kind of way. I’m trying to treat this social part of me like an atrophied muscle – it just needs practice, exercise, stretching and resistance. I’ll build it back up a little at a time.
Just like I’ll build up this website. Like our phone numbers, we’ve held onto it for many many years. It has changed with the different eras of our life together but we have held onto it because we are not hiding who we are from anyone. I’m not sure what is next in store for it, but I will try to refocus some of that scrolling energy into sharing my thoughts here. I might be screaming into a void, but I think I was doing that before, too.
I’ve also been dipping my toes into a little handiwork again, and Ian has been playing with a fun new medium. Jubilee is blowing us away with their artwork and maybe we will all dabble in sharing our creations here again.
The Facebook pages will be gone by the end of the week. I don’t know how it’ll go, but we are setting out into the wide open field of the internet. Reclaiming the World Wide Web. Planting a garden to share with the neighbors.
See you out there in the somewhere.
