There’s a frequently used meme, used when someone (almost inevitably older) talks about something that used to work well (or exist) and that doesn’t work well (or exist) any longer. You can see an example of the meme above (I found this online).

You could probably respond to at least parts of this email using a variant of that meme.

A recent article entitled What Was the Internet? dove into how the internet has changed, and it left me fairly depressed.

I’d be the last person to argue that the past internet was some sort of glorious paradise. It was not.

Still, I find it straightforward to argue that we have lost something for which we have not found a replacement. Blogs and to a lesser extent websites do not play a prominent role any longer. Whatever you were able to say about blogs (trust me, people did have opinions), the one thing that they helped create and maintain was community.

I was one of those people who played a role in the world of photography blogging. There were all kinds of blogs, and many of them functioned differently. What united them, though, was the sense of community. Many of the bloggers knew each other (or at least of each other). Even where they had very different ideas, they respected and supported each other. Some of us used to meet up in person every once in a while.

In part, that support derived from the fact that bloggers had ample control over the platforms they used. You could start a blog by simply downloading some software, installing it on your server (which at the time was something most people were able to easily do), and there was your blog. You could make it look any which way you wanted, and with very little effort you could cross-link to other people’s blogs.

In other words, given that you had control over what you were able to do, that control extended over how you engaged with others. Furthermore, it was entirely up to you how you would go about this because there was no external mechanism of any kind to do it for you.

Social media, in particular Facebook but then later also Instagram, destroyed that ecosystem. People flocked to Facebook really quickly, abandoning the blogs they had built and worked on for years. Facebook offered the illusion of community with all of its extra features. In a sense, it was less work — the infrastructure was right there, and it would connect people automatically. By now we all know what happened.

As I said, I am under no illusion that the blogging world was a paradise. But compared with what photographers now have to deal with if they’re active on Instagram, say, the blogging world was vastly better.

Imagine a world without shadow banning, say, without corporate censorship (around some presumed “community guidelines” that the community — if we want to pretend a group of consumers is that — has zero control over), a world where people could share what they wanted to share and where they could see what they wanted to see (no algorithms, either).

That’s all gone.

“Gone” also includes the lively world of Tumblr. At the time, I was too busy with my blog to spend much time on Tumblr. But from what I know there was its own vibrant community there.

Gone.

And once something is gone, you’re not going to get it back. After a few years in the corporate wilderness, Tumblr came back in some form, but it just didn’t work. It wasn’t just the presence of all kinds of built-in censorship.

It’s that re-creating something that was organically built earlier mostly doesn’t work.

There still are some blogs around (cue the grandma meme) — but honestly, who looks at them? And how do you even look at them? Back in the day, Google offered what was called “Google Reader”, which automatically aggregated the blogs you wanted to read, meaning you never had to worry about missing anything (of course Google killed it).

Honestly, I really miss the community we had back then. I don’t see it replicated in anything right now.

This is not to say that there aren’t new things. For example, everybody is podcasting right now. Honestly, I have no idea who can listen to all of those podcasts. Various people have suggested to me (some very strongly) that I start a podcast. But I don’t want to create a podcast because first of all, I never listen to them in the first place. And there are so many already.

But most importantly, having yet another photo podcast does not solve my problem of missing a vibrant community — or rather the kind of community bloggers created.

In many ways, this email list is part of an effort to at least partially re-create what some of my past blogging looked like. “Hey, I found this really interesting thing, why don’t you look at it?”

“The simple and poetic act of planting a tree,” Gerry Loose writes, “became a symbol for what was about to happen again in the ‘theatre of war’ and our collective opposition to that war and all war.”

As always thank you for reading!

— Jörg