would i blog if i was born later?
Jatan asks "Imagine you were born and brought up in a time where Twitter and Instagram always existed. Would you still blog?"
For context, I was born in 1995. We got internet at home on our shared family computer when I was 9 years old, and I got my own computer in my room at 12 years old. I think that puts me in a weird spot time-wise where I am not really very deep into a pre-social media internet, but social media was still this emergent thing you had to find out about and opt in to. I was very online back then and was always the first person on some kind of platform that then invited others into it via codes or telling them about it (oh yes, the regret is deep, but I guess it would have happened otherwise anyway). I had dozens of accounts, I was in love with making accounts on new services, like a clean canvas and space to reinvent myself as a teen. I think it was also loneliness and each profile was a bid for connection. My peers weren't online at all or just started to make profiles at 14 or 15.
So while I did have experience with forums, blogs, ICQ/MSN/Skype and websites, I was also heavily into social media. Still somehow, that didn't change my desire for long written text. Tumblr was my preferred platform as a teen and I was only shortly and rather passively on Twitter during the pandemic, so growing up, there wasn't really this stark contrast between social media and blogging. They were the same to me. I also wrote very very long texts all day long to online friends in direct messages or chats. It wasn't that I had seen it and emulated it, or was surrounded by an online culture normalizing it (Tumblr has many images and short form content, after all); it came from within me no matter what anyone else was doing. I used it as therapy, to get things off my chest, to get help and advice and sort my thoughts when help wasn't available in real life. So I think even if I was born later when the big socials already existed and favored short form content, I would still blog.
I think it's how Manuel says:
"Creative people will try to find a way to express their creativity, no matter what, and some would inevitably be driven towards personal sites and blogs."
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Published 17 Jan, 2025