Short and early Gnamma this week; I'm in an all-weekend Wilderness First Aid workshop and won't have time to write much.
I want to touch on why the newsletter format feels right to me.
My first social online experiences were in 2005, and I started blogging right away (on a Blogspot account), as a place to share LEGO creations that I thought were cool. I was 12 years old. I then co-ran a blog with a guy named Dez who I think lived in North Carolina. Or maybe Oklahoma. I joined another LEGO blog as one of a handful of writers. They all fizzled, and I can hardly remember their names.
In 2008 I got a tumblr and loved it. Tumblr helped cement some of the friendships I had made through the LEGO community which, at the end of the aughts, was crumbling. But then tumblr got ads and lost the small-scale feel of the blogging circles I was accustomed to. (In the context of today's platform landscape, it started to feel more like Instagram than a blog: short posts mostly seeking to position myself within a web of meta-aware subcultures on the platform, and less sharing what was actually on my mind.)
My tumblr use waned as I started using Are.na, twitter, and instagram. Now it's down to just Are.na and instagram, the rest fading into the internet ether. There have been fits-and-starts of a blog on my website, out of a desire for a place to put longer-form thoughts, but I always hate figuring out how to keep links alive while my stylistic preferences and web technology change. I like my instagram private, as a way to reduce noise and focus on people I already know.
Much of the joy in my relationship with online media has come through sharing things with people I don't already know. I can hardly imagine removing a public face from the internet: it is part of who I am. It's been 14 years of sharing myself and meeting people on the internet. (That's over half of my life.)
A newsletter makes sense because I want to have a public-facing place where my ideas are accessible, but I hate the necessary upkeep of my personal webpage. A newsletter using the tinyurl service for now, allows me to have a point of public access but, even if tinyurl folds, the material is decentralized into everyone's email inbox space. Those who want to hold on to the words will be able to. It takes the locus of control, in terms of maintenance, out of my hands. In terms of internet infrastructure, I think email servers are one of the most stable, so for now I'll trust in that.
Knowing that this goes straight into inboxes removes some of the ambient internet performativity that I felt came with an always-accessible blog. (Yes, I know, these are publicly archived too, but it feels like the ephemeral aspect of the publishing is more embraced.)
Some newsletters I enjoy:
Night Heron
Dream Machine
Potato Is A Mass Noun
Metafoundry
The Internet Is A City
News from Alexandra Lange
Kneeling Bus
Subpixel Space
Hitting Send,
Lukas
I want to touch on why the newsletter format feels right to me.
My first social online experiences were in 2005, and I started blogging right away (on a Blogspot account), as a place to share LEGO creations that I thought were cool. I was 12 years old. I then co-ran a blog with a guy named Dez who I think lived in North Carolina. Or maybe Oklahoma. I joined another LEGO blog as one of a handful of writers. They all fizzled, and I can hardly remember their names.
In 2008 I got a tumblr and loved it. Tumblr helped cement some of the friendships I had made through the LEGO community which, at the end of the aughts, was crumbling. But then tumblr got ads and lost the small-scale feel of the blogging circles I was accustomed to. (In the context of today's platform landscape, it started to feel more like Instagram than a blog: short posts mostly seeking to position myself within a web of meta-aware subcultures on the platform, and less sharing what was actually on my mind.)
My tumblr use waned as I started using Are.na, twitter, and instagram. Now it's down to just Are.na and instagram, the rest fading into the internet ether. There have been fits-and-starts of a blog on my website, out of a desire for a place to put longer-form thoughts, but I always hate figuring out how to keep links alive while my stylistic preferences and web technology change. I like my instagram private, as a way to reduce noise and focus on people I already know.
Much of the joy in my relationship with online media has come through sharing things with people I don't already know. I can hardly imagine removing a public face from the internet: it is part of who I am. It's been 14 years of sharing myself and meeting people on the internet. (That's over half of my life.)
A newsletter makes sense because I want to have a public-facing place where my ideas are accessible, but I hate the necessary upkeep of my personal webpage. A newsletter using the tinyurl service for now, allows me to have a point of public access but, even if tinyurl folds, the material is decentralized into everyone's email inbox space. Those who want to hold on to the words will be able to. It takes the locus of control, in terms of maintenance, out of my hands. In terms of internet infrastructure, I think email servers are one of the most stable, so for now I'll trust in that.
Knowing that this goes straight into inboxes removes some of the ambient internet performativity that I felt came with an always-accessible blog. (Yes, I know, these are publicly archived too, but it feels like the ephemeral aspect of the publishing is more embraced.)
Some newsletters I enjoy:
Night Heron
Dream Machine
Potato Is A Mass Noun
Metafoundry
The Internet Is A City
News from Alexandra Lange
Kneeling Bus
Subpixel Space
Hitting Send,
Lukas