Like many other blogs across the web, this blog automatically sends out links about new posts to various social media platforms in an effort to increase discoverability.
Occasionally, those links to social media platforms “expire” and need to be renewed. And, since I have not been the most consistent of bloggers of late, yesterday’s post triggered a bunch of requests to reconnect the site to various platforms.
This time, instead of blindly reconnecting this site to everywhere else, I started a thought (that I am still bouncing around at the moment) about the value of the feature in its entirety.
When I started blogging, it wasn’t even called blogging yet. I remember switching from manually creating pages on my own in HTML to cafelog, a predecessor of WordPress in 2001. And cafelog, didn’t call itself a blog. It described itself as: A classy news/weblog tool (aka logware).
The first platform that I cared about connecting to was LiveJournal. And I cared because my friends were there. My IRL — people I actually spent time with — friends. I had moved off LJ to a different platform because I wanted to be able to do more than what the LiveJournal platform offered. I wanted more flexibility. I wanted better tools to help me express myself.
And, over the years, the software that has run this site has continued to change: from cafelog, to b2evolution, to WordPress, to Drupal, to [GaSP](/journal/code-in-the-attic
When sites like LiveJournal gave way to MySpace, Friendster, and eventually Facebook, I had little interest in following my friends jumping from one platform to another. So, I would create an account on the new site and connect WordPress to that site (either through RSS or a plugin) so my friends would see my updates as well as the updates from their fellow users.
Facebook changed all of that.
Facebook changed the meaning of the word “friend” from someone you actually knew to someone you had barely interacted with even virtually. They gamified the collection of friends turning the total number of this new kind of friend into a status symbol in its own right.
Facebook, and its image focused kin Instagram, taught its users to stop talking to each other and instead normalized advertising at each other.
At some point, the meaning of the function connecting this site to others, changed for me and became an advertisement plain and simple. I was connecting this site to platforms I no longer used, wasn’t using, and would never use. Until today, I never really questioned that.
I don’t want to blindly advertise my content, even if that means it is not as discoverable — SEO be damned. I am finding that the focus required to promote content gets in the way of creating good content in the first place for me.
Maybe that isn’t quite right. I do have skill in both spheres. So what is it I am trying to get at here?
The creator within me and the promoter within me exist in two very different states of mind. And that promoter-mind is the one nurtured by social media. And like an overworked muscle, it has grown out of proportion and has become dominant over time.
I feel like my creative mind needs more space and silence for it to feel comfortable expressing itself. And, I can only find that quiet by avoiding time in promoter-mind.
I need to spend more time with this, mulling it over, before I can come to anything even vaguely resembling clarity.