It’s been a long time since I’ve written an actual blog entry so here goes. The last time I was an actual blogger was on LiveJournal when I was writing Acidexia and that pretty much stopped when I was 19 and began venturing into music. At 26 I now find that the world of blogging has completely changed. I’d like to share my observations with you guys: many of you who have stayed blogging: many of you who have quit: and those of you who are thinking about getting into blogging again.
10 Observations on Blogging in 2002 vs. 2010
1. Social media. Web 2.0. The end of hacker culture? Looks like some rich academic types read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and decided to run with it as they marketed themselves as “cool hunters” to everybody on LinkedIn. In 2002 everybody was a producer. In 2010 everybody is a social media couch.
2. Word Press. Learn CSS. I have so many more widgets to install. I am constantly working on Word Press now. People may argue with me but I find it to be limiting. Maybe that’s just because I was an old html coder who was making customized websites on notepad when I was 14. We called these Everything/Nothing sites and we did it all from scratch.
3. Originality is no longer important. It’s all about posting articles that other people write now. Linking to pictures that other people post. The concept of retweeting has limited the potential for new memes to emerge. Old memes get stronger but with every retweet comes an original idea that somebody didn’t share with us.
4. We have to make these ridiculous lists. People don’t like reading paragraphs. These lists are super important.
5. Antisocial types see absolutely no use for twitter. Whenever someone tries to explain twitter to them it sounds like a bunch of inside jokes which means they are immediately turned away. Me and my friends are building Antisocial Media and we are using twitter to do so. We are setting a new trend. #hashtag
6. We used to look up interests such as “social engineering” and “transhumanism” and “discordia” on LiveJournal. That was how we made real life friends. All of us in the area who shared the same obscure interets would meet through LiveJournal and then we would meet in person. Now we meet people at SXSW.
7. Our ideas. Their corporate blogs. We might as well just face it. We were starting these internet trends in 2002. We called ourselves memetic terrorists. We were the children of the information war. Yet now what? Everybody is in on it. Even the biggest companies.
8. Never make your blogs too long. Post pictures and videos to keep people entertained and make sure to name drop as much as possible. People don’t want to hear about your thoughts. They want to hear about how they can become a more effective blogger. The majority of blogs I read are centered around the subject of “how to blog.”
9. There are more and more Antisocial Media bloggers who are beginning to gain recognition. The backlash has already begun. We refuse to let the internet turn into a strip mall of a web 2.0 marketing plan.
10. Things do look slicker and shinier. That’s not a bad thing as long as there is originality, creativity, and passion behind this new polished aesthetic. I always say that the best art deserves the best canvas.
-Rachel Haywire (who will soon get her personal signature widget installed)
Haplo on 
Faith on 
Kevin George Haskell on 
7 Comments
Excellent!!! … and don’t forget prior to 2002 how we all got along writing on stone tablets.
I’m also the kind of girl that hand coded her own site when she was 15. I don’t consider myself a blogger but I have posted my random thoughts in different places throughout the years. But I hardly find WordPress to be limiting.
Being the social hermit that I am I have no idea what other antisocials do but I happily share whatever I find interesting (news, articles, etc.) via social mediums and every now and then I write actual blogs on my site.
Blogging has difinitely evolved. It’s easier to broadcast content but like everything, it could be a good or bad thing depending on the situation. But what would you call “antisocial media” and how is it really different from social media? It’s easy to see who’s begging for attention and who doesn’t. There are always those who speak their minds simply to share a point and those who speak for the sake of being listened to. In that sense, not much has really changed, it’s really about accessibility. The geeks aren’t elite anymore because anyone can have a blog and spew vomit but so what? The value in the content published is what matters and although not everyone can acknowledge it, those who care, do. Intelligence cannot exist without ignorance.
Aww, hon. CSS is just a very labor-intensive Perky Pat layout. Which is to say, it’s the code version of paper dolls. I like it as a design puzzle. Message me if you run into any snags or need anything done in this vein. I’m working on my own site, so I’m curious about variations.
is everyone a social media couch?
Spelling brigade! Observation one!
Rachel get on the ball!
I remember compiling WorldWideWeb from code to see the first website at CERN back in 90 or 91. I have seen the whole landscape of the Internet change multiple times, and it always seems to come down to the same things. A few of us try to build a better world, a world where our looks and genders and races don’t matter, just our words and then this perfect world of thoughts and ideas and actions in taken away from us by the corporate swine that only want to sell us porn and surface cleaners and low interest loans. Web 2.0 is great and all, but it is still just the web. Maybe with a little bit slicker of an interface. If we don’t take the time to find our own tribes out here and build something real, it’s all just pictures of peoples cats and group fucking. Same as it ever was…
WordPress is a huge step backwards technologically. One could customize more with less knowledge on an old Geocities site. The fact that WordPress is still based on CSS blows my mind. CSS is a dead technology. Everything should be built on XML/XHTML. That’s a clean markup language that allows you to build what you need the way that you need it. CSS is an overly complicated way to make something look pretty even if the content is lacking. But, I am getting older, so I tend to grumble about things more these days. I actually go to websites to get information, not for the pretty pictures. I could care less about what the page looks like as long as the content is good. Unless there is any blinky text. Blinky text makes me wanna get all Medieval on someone!
That being said, I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you still out there and active, Rachel. You were always one of the lights shining in the darkness. A comrade on this road of self discovery and self actualization. Keep up the good fight, and hopefully we will get to meet in the physical plane again someday.
Berashith Always,
WGP
Even if everything was in XHTML/XML then you’d still have to style the site with something, and that something would be CSS. It’s how you separate the content from style it’s how all web pages are told how to look, what colours they should have…even to what browsers should display what style sheets.
I think you’ve missed the point here.
I really enjoyed this post! I am particularly bothered by the point you raised about the lack of originality in modern blogging, and the emphasis on retweeting/reblogging, especially since the rise of tumblr and twitter. I used to follow people who only ever reblogged on tumblr, and I just think “what’s the point?”