On This Day in the Marmot

BWT: Notes to Myself

08:55 Saturday, 24 February 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 56.43°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 64% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 930

Today is the Blogging With Tinderbox meetup, so that's foremost on my mind this morning. I don't want to embarrass myself or bore my audience. Fortunately, Jack will be there too, and Mark Bernstein and Michael Becker, so there's little chance for any "dead air." (How long before no one remembers what "dead air" refers to? Soon, I guess.)

Anyway, I wanted to jot down some things I thought about on my walk this morning.

I genuinely do want to encourage more people to blog, and I'm only half-kidding when I say "You too have a complicated interior life that deserves to be explored and shared." Because it's true.

But I also wanted to make sure I didn't forget this, or "remember it later" than might be useful.

A personal blog, that consists of little more than static html files is perhaps the best way to undertake such an exploration. No lines of javascript that measure "engagement," how many page views you got, no "likes." That stuff will steal your soul.

I got started blogging pretty much the same way I got into personal computing. I could see my words on a screen! In this case, the screen was a window on something called "the worldwide web." My early stuff was link-blogging to science and technology pieces in the news, with some commentary.

As my marriage fell apart, and I got into therapy, it became a much more introspective vehicle. But not to the exclusion of everything else.

Mark Bernstein offered some early advice for bloggers, something along the lines of "cultivate good enemies." It affords the opportunity to for an energetic exchange, a lively narrative. For much of my blogging "career" my "enemies" were the Cluetrain crowd, the internet triumphalists, the guys (and they were almost exclusively (now) old white guys, who asserted without evidence that "this changes everything!" Presumably for the better.

Some things just grated me to the point of being offended. "Markets are conversations," a pernicious construction and a misapprehension of both. It conflates the commercial and the social and thereby established a business model that the leaders of which businesses are routinely called to testify before Congress. It was coined by a nice guy, Doc Searls, who was, naturally, a marketer.

Then there was Dave Weinberger and his assertion that "networks subvert hierarchy," and "everything is miscellaneous." Neither of which is true, and believing things that aren't true isn't helpful for anyone except the guy selling the book. Anther of his one-off aphorisms about the web and blogging in particular was "We're writing ourselves into existence."

Bullshit. Existence precedes narrative. All narratives are artifacts. Works of fiction. The inner voice is an unreliable narrator.

We weren't writing ourselves into existence, we were painting ourselves into corners.

Especially in "social media." The "conversation" that has been monetized by making us the product.

Blogs, especially quiet little, static html blogs subvert that.

It wasn't long after the first flourishing of the "blogosphere" before someone invented Technorati, an early effort to profit from the work of others, to monetize the conversations taking place in the blogosphere. Before that, Dave Winer hosted a blogging service called editthispage.com, which saw a pretty substantial uptake. I started out there. But it wasn't long before Dave had a page the showed how many "hits" each blog received every day.

As humans, social animals, we're very sensitive to rank, to popularity. These indicators aren't helpful in a social context. In a commercial one, they're gold.

Consider how one might go about training an animal. One popular method, because it works, is to ignore the behavior you don't want and reward the behavior you do want.

Same thing with "social media."

We post something on Facebook or Twitter, it gets a few likes. We post something else, it gets nothing. We post something else, it gets a lot of likes. We get a dopamine rush. We try to post something like that again. Pictures always get likes. Text, not so much. So everything devolved down into "memes," pics with snarky text. (I generalize here, but I hope you get the point.)

I found this happening to me on Twitter. At the end, I had a little over a thousand followers. Most of them were probably bots. But I found that I could get more likes and replies and re-tweets from a certain kind of mean and snarky post, so I found myself writing more mean and snarky tweets! Toward the end, I didn't much care for who it seemed I was.

So the combination of Twitter becoming a platform for fascists, and its corrosive effect on my self-perception compelled me to "delete my account."

Sure, I'm mean and snarky here from time to time, but I don't do it as an unconscious, involuntary conditioned behavior. It's not reward-seeking in terms of external rewards. It's the kind of writing that entertains me, not some audience whose approval I crave.

I think static html blogs facilitate a more humane online conversation. There's enough friction that we don't get the reflexive toxic reply or ego-boost. Posts never "go viral," at least not the way they do on social media platforms.

We're not painting ourselves into corners, finding that we have to maintain a certain kind of online persona in order to keep the ad rates up. We don't get distorted perceptions of ourselves in the funhouse mirror of social media.

I would genuinely like to see more people blog.

Tinderbox can help you do that with simple, static html.

BWT: Notes to Myself

Captain's Log

BWT: Practice

Bunny Wabbit

Society Garlic

After Action

About Face

Don't Move to Florida

Don't Think I'm Kidding

Less Progress

We The Builders

How Much of a Clue Do You Need?

Overnight Success

Claude and Tinderbox

Still Cold and Still Murdering People at Sea

Stay Frosty