I noticed today (February 9th, 2023) marks the 20-year anniversary of when I started my Xanga site; my first foray into blogging, but perhaps more importantly: social media, with which my relationship is presently "It's Complicated".
Prior to my household obtaining the internet in September-ish of 2002 (initially only had access at my father's medical clinic, circa 1996), I always had a love for spilling my thoughts into text documents, usually only lists of things I liked, but occasionally they'd resemble something like journal entries. Was it useful? Not really. Was it self-indulgent? Entirely. Did either of those factors matter to me? Heck no.
Xanga presented me with, what at the time, felt like a rare opportunity and unlimited power, and at such a tender age, too: I was 13; I could post the lyrics of "Creep" by Radiohead, "Komm, süsser Tod" from The End of Evangelion, or other such "deep" songs whenever my long-distance online crush / eventual girlfriend from Pennsylvania (who I'd met on December 26th of 2002 in an AOL Instant Messenger chatroom meant for Video Games) was upset with me; share the results of an online test to let the world know which character from Azumanga Daioh I was most like; copy, paste, and fill-out text-based surveys filled with important questions such as "what was the last song you listened to?" or "favorite flavor of ice cream?" (as well as questions about tattoos or drugs or hookups that my 13-year-old ass had no use for); type up scathing critiques on the state of Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon; post photos (that I had to host elsewhere) taken with an Oregon Scientific DS6618 my mom got with Marlboro Miles. That was my year-one basically, no different than I am now probably, except I have better cameras
In late 2004 or early 2005, Xanga rolled out more (what we'd later understand as) Social Network-y features, such as "Metros", which allowed you to join region-based networks and find others in your area. Naturally, I joined the Metro for Long Island, which is where I lived from ages 0 to 24. I met some cool people by way of Xanga's Metros feature, lost touch with most of them except for one, who went on to become an IRL friend by 2008. I think she said she saw some long-form rant I wrote about Johnny Bravo or the Powerpuff Girls and reached out to me over that, though perhaps the reality is she saw my profile picture and at the time and place thought I was cute and used that as an icebreaker, then realized I was a complete basket case after a few AIM conversations, but at least had the heart to remain my friend. Even with such exciting new features, in today's climate Xanga would still be recognized as more of a blogging platform, not entirely unlike beloved Tumblr.
And then in 2005, MySpace happened. It had already been around, and there were other social networks being enjoyed by others elsewhere, but 2005/2006 feels like the time American millennials all first fell into what we now refer to as "social media". I couldn't off the top of my head tell you what day it was I signed up (unlike I can with Xanga), but it was after noticing Xanga friends creating MySpace profiles and slowly migrating over to MySpace, some almost exclusively. MySpace was rather limited however, so there was still plenty of incentive to use Xanga if you still wanted to write in a blog that was pleasing to look at and easy to navigate, as well as keep from the eyes of your MySpace peers, maybe the way one today might keep appearances on Facebook and Instagram while letting their freak flags fly on Twitter or Tumblr.
MySpace was a fun and useful tool, and again presented to me at a tender age. After enough painful on-and-off-agains (maybe two, which feels like dozens within an eternity when you both start at 13 and are now 15) with aforementioned Pennsylvanian girlfriend, I decided to go and touch grass to distract myself from her. I distinctly remember going out one evening, during the final week of 2004, pre-MySpace, to a nearby arcade where I would encounter some fellow teenagers (do note that I was home-schooled and very poorly socialized.) I was rude and awkwardly aloof to their attempts at befriending me, which I'd later feel terribly about. Thanks to MySpace, some six or so months later I was able to find them on there and apologize. The boy that primarily made the attempt to talk to me back in December 2004 remains one of my closest friends to this day (and is the only friend from my hometown who'll call me on the phone now and then to reach out.)
I managed to not get myself into too much trouble on MySpace; worst I maybe did was further alienate myself from a friend of mine I'd had since 1997, who was two years older than me and began to change and see less and less of me as he entered high school at 14 when I was 12. He became what we at the time would call a "wanksta" while I was like, basically a Hot Topic mall punk but was too much of a contrarian to submit to a lot of the tropes and settled into dressing like a 1991 grunge victim while listening to Sonic Youth and Nirvana (which is sort of how I've remained except that I now have no qualms about jamming out to Avril Lavigne.) I don't feel good about losing touch with him and wish we could rekindle, but we probably have even less in common now than we did in 2005. I'd continue to hang around with that crowd from the arcade; I'd fall for one of them, but was too shy to ever confess how I felt to her, but would eventually find myself in the crosshairs of a girl who would occasionally roll with or around that same group, who was a year and a half younger than me: in September of 2006 she'd reach out to me on, you guessed it, MySpace, and become my girlfriend from 2007 to 2012.
The migration from Xanga to MySpace didn't feel so impactful, possibly due in part to my network of "subscriptions" being relatively smaller when compared to the amount of MySpace friends I'd accrued, but the migration from MySpace to Facebook was very noticeable. Many friends remained stubborn, contrarian, perhaps even elitist, over staying aboard the sinking ship that was MySpace instead of jumping eagerly onto Facebook. I can see now they had the right idea, since MySpace as we knew it is lost to time. Top 8s forgotten; rudimentary HTML skills no longer necessary; I wonder what everyone's last profile songs were.
Initially, Facebook required you to presently be attending a college university in order to join. I'm certain one could have lied their way in, but it all felt too real and official and serious business at the time to bother, especially since anyone I ever cared about was still on MySpace (or Friendster, in the case of friends and family in the Philippines.) Eventually, Facebook began to allow current attendees of high schools or those 18 and over to join, which still left me out of the picture... Until December 27th of 2007, two days after my 18th birthday. Again, yeah, I totally coulda' lied but I wasn't comfortable doing that.
At first it was a bit of a bore. Lacked the same degree of customization as MySpace, but it was easier to keep in touch or see what others were up to because you had the Wall and the timeline and whatnot as opposed to MySpace's "Bulletins". You also had "Boxes", which were like apps that you could place around your Facebook page. You were able to do things like that with MySpace via HTML, like I could have a section where it'd display my Last FM scrobbles, or a window people could MS Paint on, but Facebook had games, and its apps felt very robust and well contained. I could have a "Box" that shows all my movie ratings, and click on it and see what my friends rated them; or one that's just a bunch of Top 5 lists and see what my friends wrote out as well. Does Facebook even have stuff like that anymore? I don't know. But yeah, naturally I jumped ship and never looked back. What was also nice about Facebook was that, unlike how past social networks were very regional, Facebook managed to get all of my friends and family in the Philippines on board instead of having to juggle a Friendster just for them since they couldn't be bothered by MySpace.
I was an avid Facebooker; I'd upload many photos (taken with a Canon EOS 450D instead of that Marlboro Miles 0.8 MP camera); me and my friends would tag each other in stupid photos downloaded from all over the internet (mostly a certain *Chan site); never really felt compelled to write diatribes about the perceived ills of the world, was just stupid fun, and no leadheaded boomers in sight. I'd peak at 169 friends from 2007 to 2012, wherein I deactivated my account due to getting dumped.
I still used Xanga, though. That is, until Tumblr, which came into my life in October of 2009. That's 13 years of cringe for you to look back upon if you happen to read and enjoy this latest cringe I've bestowed upon you! I also got into Twitter, March of 2009 (same time a certain ex-president of the United States started.) Instagram in 2012, after it opened up to non-iOS users (which IMO was its death knell; used to be a hip and artsy place, everything taken in-camera and filterized and no option to be posting boomer memes downloaded from Facebook, or trying to sell whatever pyramid scheme you got suckered in to trying to play influencer)
I loved all my socmeds, each served a different use or audience: Facebook was my general dumping ground; Twitter for my "hot takes" or what I idiotically believed to be witticisms; Tumblr for myself and my most intimate thoughts but also to just reblog songs or pictures or whatever else I liked; Instagram for pretty photos.
And then somewhere along the line, I just... stopped. False restarts here and there (I was back on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from 2017 to 2020, gaining an extra few hundred friends, mostly made up of Long Islanders I lost touch with, WNYers I've met since moving here in 2014, Filipino friends and family that weren't on yet during my first hiatus, as well as family from America that didn't join up until that 2012-17 window), but always returning to this same sort of... whatever. What is it, exactly?...
It could, at surface, be read as "it's them". You might be sensing by now, a glint of "the baby boomers ruined the internet", which, yeah, I do believe to be true. I didn't used to see relatives of mine complaining about "snowflakes" or "participation trophies" or sacrificing themselves at the alters of conservative demagogues; being a Long Islander prior to 2014, I didn't have to see working-class people from the rural area I relocated to clutching their pearls about "socialism" or "the woke SJWs" when it's the people they're demonizing that they should be uniting with and eating the rich (and I say this as somebody who grew up affluent and spoiled rotten.) Yeah, I could unfollow them (without even unfriending them), but I shouldn't even have to be policing like that. There used to be an unspoken etiquette--God, I sound like one of them--that is now absent. Post-2016 socmed broke their brains, which might've already been broken from the aforementioned lead exposure, but I was still able to muster a tolerance towards them. 2020, pandemic denial, making the public health of the United States into a partisan issue, making human rights into a partisan issue, is what caused my ultimate retreat. I haven't used Facebook or Instagram since May of 2020 (maybe I've posted a few times since, but never perused the timeline.) I kept on Twitter a bit longer, but wound up dropping that too, with zero actual reason: I just forgot to check on it one day, and the days turned to weeks, weeks to months, etc. That was probably November 2020, right after the election, amusingly enough. But where does Tumblr fall into this tapestry of the Web 2.0 hellscape?...
It, doesn't. I love Tumblr as much as I ever did. I might not spend as much time on it as I used to, but I'm very frequently tempted to dust it off and pick it back up, which I have tried a handful of times before, and always fail to sustain. Why is this?
It's me, I'm realizing. Despite caring less than ever what others might think about me, I notice that I've become more self-critical and self-loathing than ever before, where I can't even type in a text file, or God forbid, write in pen and paper the way I said I used to pre-internet without feeling like I'm being self-indulgent, narcissistic, or even masturbatory. "Who cares? I certainly don't, and this is a waste of time." Such thoughts were liable to have crossed my mind in the past, whether I was writing out a piece twice the size of this on Xanga about how I think Full House is criminally underrated (note: Full House was universally reviled on the internet at the time); pouring hours into sorting and uploading photos onto Facebook; blubbering about my exes on here or LiveJournal; finding that perfect Instagram filter and settings to make sunset really pop; not even bothering to rewrite that typo-laden Tweet because it doesn't mean the same thing nine-hours removed from the exact moment Daniel Bryan won the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 30. Maybe the real difference is, I had a cheerful nihilism to myself back then that mutated into fatalistic pessimism somewhere during the (ongoing; undending) pandemic in 2020. And that just aint' sexy.
Y'know... Maybe people did care, and do miss me, and what's actually self-indulgent and masturbatory is this insistence that I ought to refrain from putting myself out there, to keep myself to myself. And I mean... Was I happier back then? Yes. Do I miss it all? Sometimes; kind of.
And for the record, no, I do not look down at those of you who've kept at this blogging thing. Quite the contrary; I envy you all and love your contents and hope you never stop, especially those in particular who are posting drawings they've made or photographs they've taken.
I'd continue rambling, like the good old days, but also like such times back when, it's coming close to midnight and I want to post this while the calendar still reads 2023-02-09. I know I could edit it to say otherwise, but that's no fun.
See ya next episoooode~... cringe
