I started blogging back when I was a teenager. I’ve long since forgotten what prompted me to start. Before blogging were the Geocities sites. Before that an interconnected web of html pages filled with tricks to break out of the hosting restrictions of free hosts. Before the days of Facebook or Twitter, it was exciting to be online.
Pages were permanently “under construction”, friends competed to come up with the most elaborate visitor counters, guestbooks became a thing. The web was a place full of curiosity and discovery. As backgrounds became increasingly psychedelic, midi tracks increasingly complex, the aim was to have fun.
Blogger, Moveable Type, and then Wordpress became places to call home on the web. Links between blogs meant something, the web had personality.
Then I grew up and stopped blogging. Looking back over old posts I started to have doubts. Was continuing to blog a sign of immaturity? Should my online presence be focussed on work, securing the next opportunity? Was it more important to be useful than to be personal. During one digital spring clean I started to look back through old blog posts. Many of them are mundane, others are deeply personal. There are thoughts there that I don’t recognise as my own. Perhaps the most jarring are posts that reveal too much about others. At times the posts, and the associated comments were not so subtly personal discussions played out in public. Many years ago now I decided to take these offline. On my home network, the full blog archive remains, comments and all. I can look back and cringe at my early days online. I won’t deny that journey existed but there is no need for it to be public.
I started afresh, saved a couple of the less personal posts and moved away from Wordpress. This time I was going to focus on the useful rather than the personal. I think it was this decision that ruined blogging for me. The moment it became about a specific goal rather than just a place to call my home on the internet it lost all appeal. The list of draft posts grew. The drafts became nothing more than titles. I stopped posting.
But I miss it. Personal blogs represent the best of what the internet has to offer. There is no need to choose between being personal and being useful. When I show up at work, I show up as me. The value people get when they pay for my time is a combination of my personal and professional experience. They are inseparable. Burying that childlike immaturity that has stuck with me throughout my working life and pretending that all I do is useful work is to deny who I am. When brave enough to ask why people like working with me the playful and, at times, the mischievous feature more than any one particular technical skill. Why did I ever feel that I needed to bury this when it came to my presence online?
I’ve missed blogging. But there has been something else holding me back from grabbing a keyboard and writing again. With the birth of our children I found myself wondering how much I wanted to share online. As life focus shifted towards being a parent, the last thing I wanted to do was feed the internet with details of their early childhood. What could I possibly write about if it wasn’t work and didn’t involve the children?
When I talk to people about their relationship with the internet today, they are invariably dominated by consuming or feeding the algorithmic platforms we call social networks today. These networks are anything but social. For me, none of them have come close to supporting the relationships and friendships that were formed through blogging. When I think about the relationship I would like my children to have with the internet, I’d like it to be their own, not one forced on them by organisations focused on profit above all else. For me, the foundation of the internet was the personal website and later the blog. Remarkably, amongst all the noise, these small pockets of personality on the internet still exist.
Recent conversations with a few people who share my experience have encouraged me to re-visit a pastime I once enjoyed. This isn’t a resolution to blog more, this is a resolution to be more me.
Keep blogging.