On why having a blog in 2024 is both a massive overkill and the right thing to do.
My first attempt at blogging was twenty years ago. I was in my late teens, Crash had won the Oscar for best film and I was less than 5 years away from moving to London, at the time living in the heart of Madrid. I created a followers-only MSN Space, an old Microsoft blogging platform, which I now regret choosing over MySpace. I wrote poems, opinions and recommendations. It was more than a journal, it was a place for asynchronous interactions where everyone could choose when to engage and could catch up on what’s been going on at their leisure.
There was no infinite scroll. Useful information such as dates, author names and titles were prominent and could be easily searched or filtered. Categories were useful and the content was candid, always trying to share sources. Multiple external links were incredibly common, not forbidden, and definitely not related to a paid “Call to action”.
I never made the blog public and I eventually stopped a few years later, as I begrudgingly accepted that apps like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offered a new way to keep things separate. Your inner circle was on Facebook, general public on Twitter, and Instagram was the glossy magazine and your everyday photobook. They promised to be candid safe places, managed by you, where you could reach out to different audiences, as opposed to ask them to come to you each and every time.
Blogs were built to be actively navigated, not passively consumed. That is the small difference that changed the framing and turned the concept of sharing on the internet upside down. Instead of prioritising and incentivising human interest on unique voices, we homogenised our output so it could be fragmented into authorless, timeless, #foryou pieces of media that compete in a “squid-game-like” algorithm battle for people’s attention. And all these for people that have since forgotten what it is to pay attention.
Hindsight is great, but at the time they came out from their Silicon Valley cave, I actually believed them.
As a web developer I immediately gravitated towards these new sites promising a place to come together and share things I would otherwise have missed. Years later, as a migrant, it also gave me an invaluable tool of communication and the main reason I constantly grappled between deleting and quickly signing up to all these new online platforms. In a quick glance, you could engage and catch up with people that have moved away or life just didn’t allow time for anymore. As a person that has always needed birthday reminders, giving some of my data to Facebook was somehow worth it. In others, you could meet people you shared hobbies with, no longer bound by geography. It was a great way to keep them present, without being overburdening or nosy.
For a while it truly felt like you were fully connected to the zeitgeist, sometimes energising me enough to contribute with a humble comment or a like or a share.
It was a synergy, seeing this explosion of information at the same time I was learning how to code and dreaming of its potential. How it could embolden the creation of much broader, more open, more honest communities that would feed on each other and their uniqueness.
It was similar to the feeling I had when I met my friends during school breaks, and one by one, we would tell each other the weird stuff we found out about the world over the weekend.
Just by scrolling with your fingers, you could now have that feeling of discovering music, games and of course gossip, all at once, at your leisure, digging into wells of knowledge, bouncing back and forth between sites trying to unravel a world previously hidden. It was a big bang, a world expanding too fast for anyone to see its full extension.
Any generation before mine had a much lower expansion of their perceivable world. Growing up in the 90s, we would expose each other to the any magazine, cassette tape, and hearsay news we had, libraries would be the place to find history, and teachers and your adults would be the first people you would ask about the world. But for me and starting with my generation, we would now have the internet, lucky as I was to have a PC and good connection, to find out more about truth. It was almost a primal instinct to go online and double-check. Because most corporations were ill-fitted to understand its full potential, for both good and evil, and its reach was limited to tech-savvy individuals that were less likely to look for sources, information was less processed and more tangible. the benefit of becoming a professional bad player was minimal (in comparison and in hindsight), as you’d most likely get banned, or ostracized and the audience wasn’t there yet in the billions for crooks to start caring enough. Weirdly, the internet’s lack of mainstream attention was its biggest draw. It was more beneficial to use traditional channels to influence people’s opinion.
Now the mainstream conversation is mainly happening on these all too convenient internet platforms, reaching even more people than any television or newspaper could ever do, and they have inherited their power while democratising not only the medium but also anonimising its sources, targeting people that simply don’t have time or patience to double check where their content comes from. This amplification of unchecked personas and the way they flooded all channels with, unaccountable, unreliable narrators, was the consequence of a business model that needed fodder at an alarming rate to be sustainable. And they did it by hiding on the fact that there’s too much shit to moderate it. Instead, they created a huge sieve called the algorithm to control the flow, not the content, so that the shit gets stirred just enough to be manageable. They think they morally can’t control it, but at their hearts, the corporates that run them are just focused on the amount of content required to keep us “inside” their platform, and to acquire it by whichever means are necessary, for as long as possible because most content is ad-supported and our eyeballs are where the money is.
Their business model is to serve anything as “content” for as cheap as possible, paying minimal amount to creators in exchange of unquantifiable but predictable exposure, as long as it is formatted for maximum consumption, catchy enough for people not to have time to think of what else they need to do. Regardless of merit, source, credit or effort, for them it’s just another easy to digest piece of media, mostly uncredited, perfectly scrollable, entirely optional. The content doesn’t matter, only its presence and attention grabbing potential is required.
By giving into this homogenisation of all content, for the sake of outreach, and agreeing to a standard that it’s made for volume, not for quality, we have turned the industry into a soul crushing factory line. We have embraced this false notion that we are all just content creators to this big exposure machine, failing to see the journey was always about finding the right audience by making the format and message captivating and unique. We are all repeating the same thoughts, over and over, so the way in which they are shared and consumed, it’s all that really matters.
The true crime, is that we have adapted our messaging to suit this new format, forgetting in the process that the format itself, matters. That the internet has given us a new range of tools to use, to create and to share our common knowledge.
That reading a long news articles always leaves you a moment to peacefully collect your thoughts after you finish it, like all good books do, allowing for your mind to shape those new concepts. That it wasn’t made to nudge you into contributing through engaging, have you or not an opinion formed yet, it simply hopes you might be one of the people that engages with it in a meaningful way, at your own time, when you can be present enough to soak it in.
Coming across a journalist exposé in a trusted newspaper, TV channel or their equivalent websites, will condense for you a much throughout insight into any issue at hand. If necessary, you will be able to check the sources and decide where and when, you have delved enough. It dares to demand your before you even start, which means you are much more likely to finish it and to truly engage with it.
A funny take that got 200k likes or a misleading headline followed by a few quoted tweets all by anonymous bots, let’s you engage with things at a superficial level, inflating numbers on items that are low-effort. It’s a parallel business of attention grabbing media that camouflages as legitimate information. Because all this networks have enforced a very specific and predictable format, and by that I mean, they have shaped their interface and the frame in which we see each piece of content through dark patterns.
Inversely proportional graph of user investment in your content versus user engagement on the platform.
In the final part of their plan, the moment both types of content can be found in the same very specific layout, one next to another, you stop telling them apart.
A hierarchy of content means they will run out of the top tier quality fast, and you will be left with a very obvious never-ending expanse of low-quality recycle items each time you refresh.
That watching a single episode, or a movie in IMAX, a theatre play, a 3:4 documentary, is allowing for the format to inform the content and that in requires for us to actively choose it
That consuming something in an unexpected format, however cheap or expensive, short or long it might be, also adds to experience, prolonging those thoughts with new questions, with the whos, the hows and the whys that will linger as much as the experience itself
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