Take Back The Internet - An Introduction
Hello and welcome any and all to my slice of the internet!
This post is going to be a bit of a brain dump and that might be a theme for what's to come. I am quite a scatter-brained individual so I tend to write multiple paragraphs at once jumping between them all at random. I'm hoping starting this blog will help stretch these writing muscles. Practice makes perfect.
My recent discovery of Bear Blog has been a part of a months long reflection of my personal relationship with the internet. While my adoption of social media was limited to the occasional post on Instagram, it's impact on communication as a whole has been unavoidable. About a year ago I decided to remove most apps from my phone leaving only the essentials I need for utilities. It's easily one of the best choices I have ever made for myself and I have no intention of going back, but it's become painfully clear how little I actually talk to the people around me.
I had been relying on Instagram for almost a decade as the sole way I'd keep up with the lives of my family, friends, and acquaintances. One of my coworkers, who I consider to be a good friend and I see almost every day, had gotten engaged and I found out a week later at a client dinner from another coworker. "You didn't see her post?" Was the response I got when I expressed my surprise.
Now, being a socially anxious person, I have to take some responsibility. I rarely initiate conversation. When the engagement was mentioned, I felt a strong guilt for the lack of effort I had put in to being a friend to someone that I see every day. This also months into my social media detox so my revelations on the extent of my years of antisocial behavior were top of mind at the time. I feel a tremendous weight to make up for how disconnected I've become from the people around me but in turn I am struggling with the significant loss of my already small social battery.
As I'm typing this, I feel like the pandemic needs a mention here as a possible catalyst to rapidly progressing my antisocial behavior.
As I've been working on strengthening my social battery these past few weeks I've spent some time reflecting back different friendships and social situations throughout my life. Around middle school and early high school I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the computer. Minecraft took a majority of my brainpower back then, so much so to where some friends and I ran multiple different servers during those years, some of which were open to the public. Hearing stories now about how games like Roblox and communication platforms like Discord are riddled with predators, I can't imagine having an open gaming server nowadays. I'm sure there was plenty of predatory behavior on servers back then but my experience couldn't have been better.
As a teenager I was a server admin for a community of 40-50 players. I had a responsibility to keep the server stable, safe, and fun; a responsibility I took very seriously. I was the one who had to look after a world where players from all walks of life showed up day after day to be a part of the same world. Some players grew to be close friends, communicating outside of the game in other forums or messaging apps. I learned how to socialize on the internet while in the psychical world I struggled deeply with putting myself out there. Having that unmonitored space on the internet, importantly one with a foundation of physical friendships, had helped build some of the core elements of my personality. The artistic, expressive, and intellectually curious sides of myself that rarely had much of an outlet I felt comfortable with in the physical world. I even had a long distance relationship at a point with someone in the UK which no doubt scared the sh!t out of my parents. Maybe a story for a different time.
"Physical world" is a weird sounding term but i feel "in real life" downplays the very real impact the internet has.
By the time that relationship had ended I had drifted away from most of those online friendships. My local friend group had grown very close and my time online had diminished dramatically. The newer social media sites that were rapidly growing in popularity like Snapchat and Vine didn't appeal to me enough to try them out. I was getting out and adventuring with friends almost every day, discovering a love for art, adventure, and companionship at a time where social media was worming its way into everyone's lives.
Flash forward to present day and my relationship with the internet is unrecognizable. I don't remember the internet being so transactional. Everything is a shop or a subscription service. I have Pihole and uBlock among other things to help make daily internet use slightly more tolerable. My email receives majority spam. I'm called my telemarketers 10 times a day. These are experiences that every single person I know personally can relate to. It's a daily talking point in my office to bring up various ways that tech is ruining our lives.
Don't get me started on AI! I see some other bloggers on here discussing AI art which has directly impacted my work recently. I will be writing extensively about that topic in the near future.
Stumbling across Bear Blog and the community surrounding it was like unearthing a community I had long abandoned still thriving just as it was. All of those community sites with CSS customization before the sterile profile pages of today. I am ready to take back the internet as the tool I know it can be for me. A tool for art, inspiration, community, support, and knowledge.
Thank you to anyone who took time out of their day to read my ramblings. Attention has become a high valued currency in this world and for anyone to spend theirs here is truly special. Please send a comment or message to my guestbook, I would love to hear from anyone and everyone. I will make a mission to do the same.