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This is sort of a blog. Ceci n’est pas un blog, maybe — it is and isn’t. It’s an archive of things I’ve written over the last ~35 years years for mailing lists (only nettime so far) and social media (only Facebook so far), reconstituted in a bloggish way — call it a jawlog, a just-add-water-log. I have several reasons for doing that (like not relying on increasingly unreliable “platforms”), but where things come from is less interesting than what they are now.

Early online resources — dialup BBSes, discussion-oriented mailing lists, and usenet groups of yore (IOW, before the Eternal September that began in 1993) —could be a lot more aggressive than we’re used to now. When Peter Merholz (another TBTF Irregular) coined the word blog in 1997, it marked a seismic shift in online culture away from actual communities toward an abstract, commodified idea of “community.” And countless discussions between people (who were often F2F or IRL friends) gave way to an understanding of the web as some kind of “conversation” you could “join.”

When social media came along, it more or less put an end to blogging. It’s got lots of problems, some of them really serious, but its weirdness and intensity reflect new stages in how we think about different ideas of community. This jawlog reflects these changing styles, and not the everyone’s-got-their-own-soapbox tone of blogs.

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