Q

Two things I miss most about the old internet: personal blogs and forums.

What happened to that? People writing. Organically. For no purpose than to share their lives and thoughts and interests.

With no concern for commercial gain, nor image and brand building. When did we start commodifying our selves and our thoughts, and will we ever stop?

Has that time really passed us for ever?

Sometimes I feel like a lone voice in a sea of void, holding on to the last vestiges of raw, unfiltered writers on the internet.

Finding an old, abandoned blog of a peer is like visiting a graveyard. I mourn its end and that eternal effigy and death date stoically carved into its last post. The death often – no, always – without warning.

Forums had more insiduous an evolution. At some point we fell off the cliff, a slippery silence. You no longer have that one real interaction that doesn’t feel like an echo from a faceless throng or mass of bots.

I struggle to encapsulate this difference.

Forums didn’t use to be a place to say your say, at least not only that.

They were a place for genuine connection. Even with complete anonymity, you feel known by a human. Gaiaonline. Taverns. Chatterboxes. Just a stream of nothing important, but even pointless response then felt that much more … personal, than an entire Reddit thread.

Even KidsCentral.sg forums. I knew and could conceive of the person with their keyboard, their earnestness of thought; their being in context of time, space, and life.

Now, I see only an array of funhouse mirrors, distorted variations of the same me, the same voice, stretched, squashed, or made silly, cleverer, but an identical thing repeated ad nauseum.