Social media. Continuing where I left off in my first ever post on this blog, social media is the opposite of communication. The internet has always been about yelling into the void, about putting a collection of thoughts out there for anyone to read. Ironically, it’s always been an offline medium. Posting on the internet in the early days required writing, composition, thoughtfulness, a coherent point, time invested in an original idea.

Well, maybe not in the comments section, where it became a trope to yell “FIRST!!” in claiming the first comment on a freshly-minted article. But that’s sort of the point I’m making anyway. Social media is the comment section. There’s no substance to it; just a bunch of people yelling incoherently.

If that is true, then why it is so prevalent and - apparently at least - so important in today’s world? Because it’s yelling at scale, and scale is useful.

GeoCities, AngelFire, later spirits like tumblr. Even, to an extent, AOL’s “walled garden” of keywords and an FAQ page that described RTFM as read the fine manual. All of these were an attempt to make consumerist, commercial sense of the internet. Okay, so, AOL was also an ISP and you needed one of those to get on the internet in the first place - not that you don’t now, it’s just that your cell provider or cable company became the ISP - but that’s not the point.

GeoCities let you choose a name and number, based on your interests, and then gave you a place on their site to start writing. Sharing your thoughts. This might sound like social media, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t about instant gratification, likes, subtweeting your friends or selling someone else’s product to make a living. Hell, if you had friends IRL you weren’t telling them about your GeoCities site. Back then, the internet...