As I sit here in my bed, on a chilly spring morning, thoughts are running in
my head about just how insane the Internet has become. Not just the web, but so
much of the net as a whole. Browsers are trying to depricate the likes of FTP
and RSS/Atom, people are trying to "end" email with social media and chat apps
of all kinds, some web devs want to replace HTML and CSS with pure JavaScript,
and things are just a mess in general. It's like watching an expert tell a
client that everything is working fine, but they're going to have to strip it
all out and start again because /they/ aren't happy with how things were done.
For some reason, people seem to think that "old is always bad, so get rid of
the old for everything new". Replacing blogs with social media is one such case
that constantly baffles me, since social media and blogging don't compete with
each other. Blogging is long-form, social media is usually short-form. But then
it hit me.
People see social media as /places of thought/. Somewhere to go to put down
what's on your mind at that moment. Blogs are also /places of thought/, just
not for brief thoughts that are summed up in a sentence or two. They're made as
a place to actually explain one's ideas in a way that gives more context, and
in that sense, give people deeper insight on the thoughts being expressed. It's
a completely different paradigm than social media.
For that reason, people see the two as competitors for their attention, and
competition--even when unintentional--breeds some level of animosity between
certain types of supporters. One side sees the other as a "problem in need of
solving", when there's really no problem at all. This is constantly seen in the
tech industry as a whole, but even among the wider masses, it's starting to
become far more noticable in the mainstream. The idea that something must /move
aside/ to make room for something newer has begun to take off in the minds of
those who really don't understand how untrue that really is.
Gopher is another example of this. For some reason, people see the web as the
/winning/ protocol, but in reality, it never disappeared, and has never needed
to do so for the web to live. Likewise with FTP, FIDONET, BBSes, USENET… The
List seems to constantly grow with every passing year. "IRC is old, Discord is
its replacement!" and "Slack is the new Email!" have shown up among newsmedia,
most of whom are only after views on their gossip rags that once resembled some
form of journalism. "Google Reader is Dead, and so is RSS!" also comes to mind.
FTP is still around, as is FIDONET. So are BBSes and newsgroups. So are email
and IRC. And so is all the new stuff. There's plenty of space for everyone and
everything, and yet there always has to be a /winner/ for some reason.
For me, I don't care about /winners/ or /losers/ in software and standards. I
just want to use what works for me. And honestly, that what I think everyone's
priority should be. "Use what works for you."
Blogs, phlogs, gemlogs… They're places of thought. And these are my thoughts.
