Amy Hoy has a thoughtful post on the early evolution of blogging and how choices that were made back in those early days have shaped a lot of what's happened with content on the web since. The shift from creating new pages and building your own system to one where you're using tools, form and text fields and effectively working inside a system. The impact and form expansion of frequent chronological updates, that then formed the basis for the wider social web, which then became less chronological and more algorithmically curated and ultimately meant that we have ever less control:
'The potato gun girl and gerbil genetics guy found they didn’t want to write updates. It didn’t make sense. Their sites should have remained a table of contents, a reference tool, an odd and slightly musty personal library… the new “posts” format simply didn’t work for what they wanted to do. It felt demanding, and oppressive…
But they’d already switched. They’d already spent all that time and energy and optimism. To switch back, they’d have to go through that process all over again. Only worse, of course, because they’d have to build the new (old) site completely from scratch. They had no tool to give it shape…
And once you’ve had a taste of effortless updates, it’s awfully hard to back to manual everything. So they didn’t.'
In many ways Amy is lamenting what she calls the 'weird web' – the kind of quirky stuff that characterised a lot of early web development and community, but she makes an interesting point about how seemingly innocuous choices that we make can have a much bigger impact down the line.
Although I've been writing less frequently of late, I still value blogging enormously (it has in its own way been quite life-changing for me). But the social web (if we can still call it that) is changing fast. A lot of blogs that I used to cherish reading have sadly now gone. The practice of curating your reading through RSS feeds from people whose writing and opinion you valued has now largely gone too. A lot of writing has moved to Medium and there's some great stuff there but there's also a lot of things written for clicks. Twitter has largely replaced a lot of the conversation and commentary that used to happen in the comments sections of blogs (commentary that was often more insightful or interesting than the original blog post) and I still get enormous value from it but there is also a lot of anger there now. The heightened emphasis everywhere on recency as an arbitor of value which perhaps means that older, more useful things get ignored. The sometimes neediness of content and influencer marketing.
Things change, and I really don't want to be overly-nostalgic, but it is worth remembering that in what feels like a building momentum towards ever more ephemeral content, even the simplest choices that we make now will likely play a large part in shaping what happens in the future.
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