Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, from your friend Billy Zane.
Merry Christmas from Billy Zane

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Reboot

I miss blogging. I should say, I miss the time before Facebook overtook the social media space. In its shadow remain any number of platforms good and bad, including early standouts like LiveJournal that naively respected the agency of users (in its early years, at least) and even provided tools to control, at a very granular level, to whom your content would be displayed. Now instead we share all-or-nothing with our high-school classmates, our fussy aunts, our co-workers, and our actual friends, all so a pack of monstrous Ivy League wankers can profit from plastering ads in, on, and between our vacation photos. It stinks.

To keep a personal blog in the age of social media is to engage in a solitary activity. It forces the writer to confront the question, For whom am I writing, and why? If I’m not getting little dopamine boosts from feedback notifications, why am I doing this? And perhaps also, If I write primarily in order to soak up social validation, maybe that isn’t the best motivation. Continue reading “Reboot”