Mr. Social Media

I once read something funny in an old demotivational poster meme: "Blogging: Never Before Have So Many People With So Little To Say Said So Much to So Few."  That meme was from many many years ago, when the word was first earning its place in the common vernacular of the internet and the demotivational poster meme format was trending.  I find it funny especially now, since that is precisely what I'm doing with some new free time I've found since retiring this month.  Blogging, pointless as it may be, I think is still a healthier use of time in 2020 than, e.g. watching TV news constantly in passive anticipation of receiving your next daily dosage of fresh COVID fear.  My satisfaction in writing is not diminished by a lack of anybody reading it.  In many ways its therapeutic, and I highly recommend everybody try it someday.

I got my first email address joff@iastate.edu at Iowa State University in the 90's so I've been "on the internet" longer than most. I first discovered and used USENET, email lists, and eventually IRC chat.  Within 4 years though, the novelty of the ability to connect with random strangers on the internet wore off. By the time the dot-com crash hit in 2001, I had replaced my virtual social network of computer geeks with a real physical one grown from one of my non-technology related interests: cycling.  I have a lot to say about this absolutely wonderful past time but will save it for a future post.

When Facebook started getting buzz in 2004, I was uninterested.  I did like that the site enforced using your real names instead of the clever handles and pseudonames that emboldened the previous generation of social media users to start flame-wars, become trolls, and write highly opinionated pieces with no accountability as Anonymous Cowards. Even still, I figured the hordes of people signing up for Facebook were just late comers to the "Information Superhighway" and they would eventually join me in the opinion that its just another technological toy to be thrown away after a few years once novelty wears off.  After all, the internet bandwidth to my old dorm at Iowa State University was over 10 years ahead of anything available in US residential, so it seemed feasible to me that I might also be 10 years ahead of the mainstream in the adoption and inevitable abandonment of social media.

Boy, was I wrong.  "The Internet" now is almost synonymous with the phrase "Social Media" and Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. I still refrain from having a Facebook or any other internet based service optimized for opinion broadcast and amplification.  There was a short time in this last decade I was tempted, but my social needs are pretty low and completely satisfied being in the quiet proximity of others on a long group bicycle ride.

There are some things I miss from the generation of internet social media that preceded Facebook though.  On those early USENET groups and mailing lists, people would actually compose their thoughts in well put together essays and take time and put effort into articulating something.  The unspoken etiquette was that if you're going to bother the machinery of the internet to the task of distributing your words, you better make dang certain you have more than a couple sentences worth of content to share.  Perhaps this is why a blog may just be the perfect media format for me, since I pay for, run and maintain this server machinery myself from an AWS EC2 instance (Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud) and feel no shame for wasting your time or anyones bandwidth with my random drivel.