What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.
The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.
But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.
The first was that maintaining your own website is kind of a bother. It doesn’t cost much money to buy a web address, set up hosting, load up WordPress, and get going—but social media sites are free. It does cost a fair bit of time to set up and moderate a blog and to deal with the various technological complications that arise. Figuring out how to post ads or take subscriptions and get paid for your work is even more time-consuming.
Was Social Media A Mistake? Here’s An Experiment To Find Out
The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.
But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.
The first was that maintaining your own website is kind of a bother. It doesn’t cost much money to buy a web address, set up hosting, load up WordPress, and get going—but social media sites are free. It does cost a fair bit of time to set up and moderate a blog and to deal with the various technological complications that arise. Figuring out how to post ads or take subscriptions and get paid for your work is even more time-consuming.
Was Social Media A Mistake? Here’s An Experiment To Find Out
