Musing about media (also of the social kind)
Well then.
I'm back here, many, many years after I initially left to pursue greener pastures. Ironically a few years later tumblr itself became one, but I digress. I've decided to try to keep a (at least) monthly blog to force myself to write a little more. I don't have a plan, or really any idea about what I want to write about yet, but many things in life are little like being a forgetful skydiving tailor; jumping first, and then having to build the parachute on the way down.
So firstly I wanted to expand on something I wrote about a week back on Twitter. The new frontiers in social media. It seems like the 2010s are coming to a close, with many of the foundations of that decade suffering some shakedowns and shuffles.
The new 10's were a strange decade, and obviously we're not really far removed enough to say what did and didn't make the decade what it was, but I have a few pointers. I'd say there's at least one notable characterization: the celebration of corporatization.
Fittingly for tumblr, I'd say the decade really got its flame from the geek culture early on in the decade on this very platform. From my formative years here, I pretty strongly remember the fandoms, and especially the mixed media fandoms like "superwholock". Obviously big balls of nonsense fangirling isn't exactly anything new but the thing I remember distinctly is mainly how different the approach to media appreciation was, it was little less "hey I like this and I was inspired by it to do my own thing" and more just "I FUCKING LOVE BEING A FAN OF INSERT THING HERE BOY I WILL CONSTRUCT MY ENTIRE PERSONA AROUND BEING A FAN". A little self-indulgent, to be blunt.
You can probably pretty easily draw a feeble and tortured mental line from that to the later big IP fests later on, where big companies would just grab metaphorical action figures out of their massive vaultlike toy chests and mash them together, for massive profits!
So uh, what the fuck am I on about and how does this relate to social media? Well, I think the early tumblr years ended up colouring the internet far more than you'd expect. After most of the users jumped over to the bigger sandboxes like Twitter later in the decade, I think the internet in general started to transform a little, away from the small communities of fun people to users just living in their comfort zone.
I'm a little worried about the future of the internet, but also hopeful. I think the one big thing of the 2010s we should leave behind is living in some nebulous cloud of likeminded stuff masquerading as a community and instead learn to appreciate the smaller groups of people around you, for what they are. It's what I truly hope to see out of the new frontiers.