Today’s writing prompt asks “in what ways do you communicate online?”. The quick answer would almost certainly be “not as much as I used to”. The real answer is somewhat more complicated.
I am a member of “Generation X”. I lived through the proliferation of the internet, the world wide web, and latterly anything and everything with the “social” label attached to it. I remember a time before - before. I remember America Online, Compuserve, CiX, and countless dial-up bulletin-board systems.
I remember talking to strangers in Compuserve forums. I had a house in a fictional street in Geocities. A friend on the other side of the world talked me into joining LiveJournal - at about the same time Mr Zuckerberg was writing about his girlfriend. Back then LiveJournal had just been acquired by Six Apart who then re-imagined it as Vox, and collapsed in on themselves. Yahoo 360 befell a similar fate.
I remember MySpace. Who else does? How about the original Blogger site - before Google bought it? Or Moveable Type? Or the b2/cafelog script that became Wordpress?
Anybody remember Posterous? How about ICQ?
You can take all of your Facebook Messengers, WhatsApps, Telegrams, and whatever else - ICQ was first, closely followed by Yahoo Messenger. MSN was late to the party. If you’re wondering, MSN became Skype, which became Teams.
I’ve been everywhere at one time or another.
Even the words on my blog have lived almost everywhere. From a hand-written blog, published on my own webspace, through Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace, Livejournal, Vox, Yahoo 360, Tumblr, Posterous, Moveable Type, Textpattern, Drupal, Squarespace, Joomla, Mambo, Ghost, Writely… more places than I can easily remember.
At times I have railed against “the man” - the “walled gardens” - and at other times I have exhaled in defeat and slumped down in the corner of the vast cities we now inhabit - just happy to “be”.
These days I’m just happy to post a few words to the blog every day or so, and to hopefully keep up with a few friends via WhatsApp. I’m happy to “be me”, rather than whatever anybody else wants.
When I was young I was often the quiet person in the crowd - overlooked but hoping to be seen. These days I’m still the quiet one at the back of the crowd - but happy to be discovered. There’s a difference.