I thought it was only fitting that my first blog would be on the indie web and my views on social media as a way to interact with people. This is my first try at actual writing so please bear with me.
The internet has changed a lot over the course of its existence, some changes for the better and some for the worse. One of the changes which I personally feel has been bad, is the loss of the personal website. Even though I’m not old enough to remember the early internet and the growth of platforms like GeoCities. I have tried to become familiar with the early internet and how it was different to what we have now, and one of the biggest losses I see is the personal website.
Social media platforms have become this aggregate of all social interaction on the internet and thus made it so that you need to use social media to be able to interact with people. And next to the horrible parts of social media like the rampant use of ads and the way in which it has shifted social interaction. I also don’t really feel like my own private Instagram page is mine. It feels like its Instagram’s desperate attempt to make me feel like I can be my own actual person on the internet. Instagram is a platform that distils social interaction to liking posts and writing comments that are too short to be able to really say something. And that’s why personal sites are so important to me. I want to be able to have a place that is just purely my own, somewhere where I’m not directly influenced by algorithms and corporate greed. Personal websites are spaces where you can express yourself in this beautiful way without needing the approval of some corporate overlord who needs money.
The internet has made contact with other people so easy and accessible and yet the only thing we do is use it to talk to strangers about politics without trying to get a real understanding of one another, and I am also guilty of this. I sometimes comment on videos of pastors trying to explain why life could only have been created by god and videos of peoples whose beliefs don’t align with my own. And even though I can sometimes be a bit snarky I try my best to actually understand why these people believe what they believe and try to see if we can get to a common ground.
But most importantly is that social media takes away time that we can use to actually do something. Instead of going on Instagram, you can actually go talk to people, instead of watching TikToks you go for a walk. There are so many things to do with your life and social media takes time away from you actually doing what you want. I recently saw a video by Ella Aafjes about how she got rid of her phone and what it did for her and in it she talked about seeing time as money. Every hour in the day is one coin and you use these coins to do things, for example sleeping takes 8 coins since you do it 8 hours a day, but for those 8 coins you get a lot back. Another example is selfcare, eating and cleaning yourself and whatever else, you can choose to forgo this but doing so means you feel worse about yourself. Every coin you use gives you something back, whether its long term or short term. The problem with social media however is that the thing you get back isn’t the reason you are doing it. You sleep because you know that if you don’t you feel way worse, there is an incentive outside of the act itself to do said act. But social media works differently. Instead of having an incentive which makes you do the act, social media itself is the allure, the reason you are doing it.
But still, I am a hypocrite. I talk this big talk about how evil social media is, yet I myself still use it way too much. I spend around 5 hours a day on my phone. I’m very bad with going through with the things I want to do, even this piece took me way too long to write. I want to learn how to play guitar yet put no effort into actually doing so. I do way too little for my study, and one of the reasons for this is social media.
And for everything bad I have to say of social media I do also kind of want to sing its praise. There are beautiful parts of social media that get overlooked, sometimes fairly sometimes less so. One of the places that I feel gets closest to what I want from social media is TikTok live. And this may sound like an insane statement but I feel there is some beauty there in between all the horrible parts. I’m not talking about all the engagement bait streams I’m talking about the stream of people just talking, people singing songs, people just chilling. In my limited time on the platform, I have seen world famous actors like Justice Smith just chilling and hanging out, I have seen people who played their guitar, I have seen people just wanting to connect and it feels so great to join these lives because they are getting closer to real connection than anything else on social media ever can.
And I get this same type of feeling from personal sites, they are such beautiful places where people just talk about what they want to talk about. And even though there is some extra work in setting up your own website it is definitely worth it. Even though I ended on this positive note I do want to stress that I do not think that social media in its current form should be allowed and condoned. I’m still on the fence on if it even should be allowed at all, but what I do know is that personal websites are what the future of the internet should be.