Photographed by Jonathan Hayward

Those celebrities do those grand farewell tours, only to come back a while later and do another one.
   I wonder if my farewell post at my Vox blog will be like that. The comments make very interesting reading as Pete and I dissect the site and give it a post mortem.
   This was a very interesting and poignant observation from Pete, whom I met when 20Six was still a cool, vibrant UK community (back in 2006):

In many ways I wish blogging never went mainstream, it was the worst thing that happened for it because it’s left a lot of people who loved it feeling like fish out of water and there are lots who don’t really do it now. (I note there are some who do, but generally.)
   I’m relieved someone else has said this as I had started to wonder if maybe I was just fading out and the community was still thriving in other places and with other people. It just feels like back then we all did it because we wanted too, in the main there was no agenda or anything it was just genuine desire to use this method of communication.

   I responded (some links not in original):

Every medium suffers this fate: newspapers were once respectable before Rupert Murdoch; email was a nice medium before spammers began harvesting addresses. Blogs were, by and large, civil places to exchange opinions before that descended into anonymous name-calling in comments. Now I see in New Zealand a florist has allegedly manipulated Google Maps to harm her competitors—what motivates someone to purposely destroy data that has been freely and publicly compiled for the common good?
   I still believe there is room for huge online communities, including some form of modern chat room (as we had discussed before). The world has moved on and maybe some are afraid of potential abuse, something we bloggers did not have to contend with back in the early 2000s. The sharing during the Clinton era seems to have evaporated, and we humans have been the undoing of that.
   I can understand why sites such as A Small World are so exclusive: they don’t want to see the same decline. There are harsh penalties for “friending” people you do not know, including lifetime bans. Snobbery, sometimes, can be our friend—something I never thought I would catch myself saying. Maybe that is the next stage, and Yappey itself is so far the sort of forum where we can exchange ideas quite freely without an agenda.

   It begs the question: what next for the online world? Oh, it’s not Facebook. I am talking about a site that respects its users.

Labels: civility, civilization, decay, internet, media

Posted by Jack Yan, 00:07  permalink

comments

Post a Comment  Links to this post