My First Blog Entry
I first heard about Bear Blog from my friend Sam, who recently got off of Instagram. Like him, I have been losing interest in main stream social media for quite some time. The internet used to be a place where people could come together, find information, share ideas, and everyone could have their voices heard equally. It was more democratic than it is today. Now, we are at the whims of algorithms, sponsored posts, AI, bots, and rampant censorship. The internet has slowly become a tool for rich and powerful people to exploit everyday people for profit, and I’m sick of it.
I’m certainly not the first to express these sentiments. Authors like Cal Newport and Shoshana Zhuboff have written all about it in their respective books, “Digital Minimalism”, and “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”. I highly recommend them to anyone also interested in this topic.
Despite these feelings I’ve long harbored in regards to social media, I’ve struggled to remove it from my life entirely. I’ve deleted my social media accounts many times, only to end up right back on them months later. At the moment, I do still use Instagram and Facebook, but it has been quite some time since I’ve actually posted anything, and I rarely spend time there keeping up with friends. Instead, I doom scroll and look at memes. I know I’m not alone in all of this.
There’s nothing wrong with memes. They can be pretty entertaining, and I do occasionally enjoy sharing them with friends whom I think would appreciate them and get a good laugh. That said, I’ve never felt a sense of satisfaction after any of my doomscrolling sessions. And unlike the flash videos of the early 2000s I grew up watching, I think I would struggle to remember most of the memes I see today ten, twenty years from now. Things don’t go viral in the ways they used to. We’re not all seeing the same things and having conversations about them anymore because our algorithms are tailored specifically to us, and they are designed to show us what we want to see, and what they think will keep us on the platforms the longest so they can show us more ads.
I never feel good about the time I’ve spent on instagram or Facebook. If anything, I feel worse. I believe this is because it lacks intentionality. There’s also a lot more noise due to the sheer amount of content out there. It’s all seemingly vying for our attention, and it overwhelms the senses and leaves us feeling overstimulated.
In any case, I miss the old internet. I miss how things used to be much more focussed on community. I also miss how sites like Myspace used to allow you to customize your profiles, and make them into your own little corner of the web. Like having your own website where you can express yourself, and show who you are to friends and to the world. To share your own thoughts, ideas, hopes, and dreams. This has become completely lost over time. Every social media platform and profile looks exactly the same now, and for every one post from someone you care about, you have to sift through tons of garbage. They lost the sense of personality first, and the community soon followed. There are still personal websites of course, and blogging has been around for a long time. Even so, there aren’t too many places on the internet anymore where you can go without being bombarded by pictures, videos, and audio with the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and distracting you from the content you actually want to see.
I’m excited to use Bear Blog. It reminds me so much of the early days of the internet, before it all got enshitified. I'm excited to share and be exposed to ideas in ways that feel much more organic and authentic than what I’ve grown accustomed to. I’m excited to actually create content on the internet, rather than just mindlessly consuming it. I don’t know how often I’ll post, but I’ve got lots of ideas for topics I’d like to talk about, and I’m excited to share them with anyone willing to listen.