The fundamental [tumblr] vs. Twitter thing is that Twitter treats replies and reblogs as creating a subforum about that particular post, and no bby what is you doing
Decorating my house from Internet retailers the algorithm can pick up on means that these days Facebook ads quite precisely match my taste and often do in fact offer things I would like but wouldn’t have even thought to look for (where?)
I think old people deserve a fair hearing, one they aren’t afforded all too often in the multimedia era. I believe that the elders aren’t always wrong and the young aren’t always right. Growing up, we were lied to about all this, ironically by the people who are now old. The “never trust anyone over 30” boomer generation inculcated a sense that youth is just a form of incipient correctness. The future is theirs, so therefore they will be right about the future. Inevitably though, the young, while dictating the future, will ruin it in some glaring way. They’re human, it happens. And keeps happening.
Worse than Twitter’s baseline tone is just the omnipresent, reflexive demonization and collective will to hurt outgroup individuals. Connected to that is a panicky willingness to buy into emotionally charged stories that you don’t dare question your in-group on. Did we all become Deadspin? No, Deadspin wasn’t like this in 2008. But, if I’m honest, it was probably one more step to wherever we are. And this current place, perhaps a hell and perhaps a purgatory, is an ever-changing but seldom evolving shit show. It’s been one big refutation of the once-ballyhooed idea that we should all be speaking to each other, constantly.
What the boomers missed, however, was how they created this generation. They promoted an aesthetic of rebellious gatecrashing, then pulled up the ladder once safely ensconced. Moreover, they demeaned their privileged perch out of a moralized pique, all while ceding no purchase. This food is terrible, and such small portions, but none for you. No tradition was upheld because no tradition was offered.
So the younger generation responded in kind, not with tradition, but with an all-out assault on it. They beat the establishment, then beat themselves, and in the end, almost nothing endured.
Speaking of Ye Old Internet, loved this article on Hipster Runoff, a 2010′s alt ‘blog’ on indie/hipster gossip, in relation to the fake-real trend of Indie Sleaze today. Honestly just great for showcasing how long-form articles, talking about music and culture, would back then organically use AOL IM tics like “I am trying to make ppl talk abt my blog” and “h8-wave-warketing”. This crew of new internet writers were texting-first, websites-second people and they just unapologetically dragged those norms with them.
Which I think makes sense when that generation of writers were so flippantly apathetic to the idea of greater meaning beyond status games and internal aesthetics, as summed up one of the final essays by the founder of Hipster Runoff:
I am not a writer. I am not a blogger. I am a content farmer. These words mean more to the Google robot than they do 2 u. There is nothing exciting about writing, tweeting, or sharing opinions. I do not want to inspire any one to follow me into this dark prison, surrounded by a pile of memes, while I must sort thru them and spin them as ‘meaningful’, ‘interesting’, or whatever else will generate a pageview.
Which was not a ‘confession’ or a break of kayfabe, instead par for the course of the irony-filled Obama generation. As the article points out, for the current generation of internet discourse, when:
The culture we consume no longer tells us where we fall on the spectrum of ‘mainstream’ to ‘alt’; it tells us whether or not we’re a good person, whether we deserve good or bad things to come our way.
Well then you need to polish up your writing skills and shed the silly jargon for such a job of import, right?
(Also character limits on texts went away. That is like, 80% of it, kids wouldn’t get the joke now. But I mean, twitter brought that back to be vintage, so who knows)
The shift in the medium of popular online socializing from a forum-based format to our present individual profile system created trackable metrics by which social popularity could be measured and compared beyond the simple quality of reception that one’s posts get, which is an underdiscussed contributor to the hierarchy and marketization of modern social relations. In 2007 you’d just have to find forums for other people who were also interested in a particular topic and directly conversate with them, without being able to resort to follower counts or personal brands as a heuristic for legitimacy. Just a few random people all interested in early 20th century trains seeking one another out and starting relationships from scratch
Been thinking about that WB exec who told me around 2008 that the reason there weren’t more “black” TV shows even though there was a pent-up demand was that a network’s real customers aren’t viewers but advertisers and there weren’t enough that wanted a specifically black audience (tho there were for children, teen, young adult, elderly, male, female, rich, poor, etc.)
Makes me wonder how much the rise of “identities” in recent online media has to do with algorithmic advertising where the content and the ads are decoupled so you go for breadth and intensity of audience with a “black” or “feminist” theme (or any other vertical, like “sports” or “cars”) and then the algorithm serves each viewer individually optimized ads for like, Dyson vacuums or furniture or vacations, depending
(And also I wonder if something of the reverse didn’t happen with GamerGate, that games journalism turns on “previews” and insider stuff that’s advertising as far as the studios care, rare and in-demand content to readers, and cheap, subsidized content to the editors, with tighter ties and more effort than traditional media ad placement. So studios felt bound to Polygon and Kotaku cause they had the readers, and readers felt bound cause they had the exclusives, and as it shaded from “yay AAA vidya!” to walking simulators and colonialism thumbsuckers*, the entry costs prevented competitors from capitalizing and everyone just got angry and resentful instead?)
* ‘cause it’s come up twice, “thumbsucker” is an old journalism term for what today would be called a “think piece”
Home to everything you ever wanted to know about railroad history West of the Hudson and Around New York State railroad, history in Chicago and the Midwest, Connecticut, Links to some great WebSites of New York State railroads. An index of the railroads of New York State. Railroads in Mechanicville and Ballston Spa.
Hey, take a look at this website. It’s… I don’t know what it is, really.
My first instinct is to say with the cluttered, hand-coded look, in-line off-brand ads, ancient clip art, and the assembly of hobbyist knowledge in a non-interactive, idiosyncratically paginated and directoried, personally hosted site, it’s a perfect example of the Internet 1.0 of the late 1990s.
But that’s not true, is it. If you follow links - and there are a lot of them - the “site” sprawls over multiple domains, with the same appearance, but unique (and honestly interesting) content. Allkinds of railroadstuff, but also things like French golf courses.
The more I look at it the more it seems to be mid to late-2000s SEO-optimization, which would explain the network of links to related pages which might or might not themselves be optimization platforms. It definitely postdates (or at least has been updated since) the development of Facebook and Twitter integration. But by the standards of SEO optimization it seems awfully artisan - the material’s higher quality than I expect from content farms, and seems personally curated and to maintain some semblance of a coherent voice, plus it doesn’t follow the one page per topic, cranked-out and autoformatted for digestibility format I’m used to. Plus, optimizing for what? The ads are a total dog’s breakfast - the only recurring product that seems to be “in-house” are logistics services, so that might be it.
The more I follow links - half because I’m fascinated about the material discussed, half because of the page itself - the more I’m amazed at how much train content there is out there - it seriously outpaces the pop culture products I’m used to as icons of fandom content saturation. Then again, “trainspotting” was one of the original pre-internet models for anorak/otakudom. I guess it’s well-positioned for that - trains tie into pretty much every aspect of Industrial Era life, and are full of little whorled and niched aspects packed with arbitrarily large yet still finite - and well-documented - volumes of information. The kind of field anyone could enter, would take years to master, and yet could never be feasibly completely conquered. Always one more fact to track down; one more source to unearth; one more person to contact, learn from, credit, integrate into the society…
