OK…
I have sort of fallen off the wagon on this blog but I am excited to get back into it. I went through a big life change when I was making this website several months ago. I moved states after living in one place most of my life and was using this website as a way to do some sensemaking about the world. Now, I'm a bit more settled into a job and have been exploring other hobbies like (very simple) woodworking. I feel like the website explored what I wanted at the time and I've been moving past that BUT now I'm realizing I need to be thinking about these subjects again.
Since my last post, I have removed Instagram from my life. I did this because I don't like what social media does to people in general. There is incentive to the branding of oneself I have talked about in previous blogs. The synthesizing of personal taste with branding, advertising, and overt consumption are things I don't think are good for individuals or building a community. In other words, when people start to want to turn themselves into a product for these corporate platforms by becoming content. Instagram, in particular, unnerves me because this process intersects with people I personally know. Seeing the image that friends create of themselves online compared to how different it feels from how they are in-person just makes me feel a little strange. I don't blame people and any of my friends for this. It's just become the mainstream way for people to share stuff they make with the world sadly.
However... Now most of my internet consumption habits are through reddit and youtube, especially youtube shorts. Not good. At this point, reddit is mostly political slop that is digested a second time through such credible primary sources like twitter, tiktok, and facebook. It used to be an aggregator of forums but now I realize it seems like it was a good idea to have intentional individualized forums on the web. Youtube shorts present some sort of disconnected world where everything seems fake. Agendas hide behind the mundane events of most everything on there. It's kind of like an exaggerated reality TV. I miss the youtube where subscriptions were the primary source of content and the front page was for viral things.
I can't decide if getting rid of instagram was good or bad because now I'm left with alternatives that feel totally ungrounded. I've also cut off my main (flawed) source of what is going on back home.
Ultimately, the problem of this is that these platforms, through the population surviving the pandemic, have established themselves as the main "town-square," where discourse about most things happen. Even in 2019, That didn't feel like quite the case. I just feel a bit like I'm missing out on how culture is moving because of the monopoly of these platforms. While there is an element of FOMO in this, a majority of popular culture is now certainly digested on Web 2.0 platforms.
Plan of action - turn instagram back on in a regulated way and more directly restrict my youtube and reddit use. I will probably get rid of reddit or at least the main page if I can figure out how.
I think I have to really want to get rid of these things like I did last September and I think I've lost the drive to make that a reality since. It's taken me getting to this point to want that again thankfully.
P.S. Also I think that no longer writing these blogs has been bad for my cognitive well-being. I feel energized and excited to keep writing these. I hope that this finds you well to whoever is reading this :)
