(not “anti-social media”)
How I Use The Internet Now
tl;dr: I’m going back to using RSS feeds to curate my own experience of the web and here’s why (and how)
jump straight to the tools section
The Ancient World (Wide Web)
I got online in 1993, like a second-wave immigrant. I never used Usenet or an acoustic coupler, or The Well, but I have typed in IP addresses for sites that hadn’t bought domain names yet. So I was there, early-ish.
I had an email address in 1993 (thanks, ed.ac.uk!), built my first (geocities: soho/lofts/5572) website in 1996 and hand-coded the ‘next’ and ‘back’ buttons on my proto-blog, before wringing my hands about choosing between Movable Type and WordPress (I stalled long enough for WordPress to become a viable option).
I joined blog circles, and kept a bookmarks folder of the blogs I was interested in reading on a regular basis, and visited them every day.
Eventually used Google Reader to follow the RSS feeds of blogs I liked, then switched to Feedly when Reader went away.
This meant I could pull up my feed reader and see who had posted new stuff I was interested in, and read it. And because I had the feeds arranged by folder, I could look ONLY at the things related to writing, or the things related to news, or the things related to ‘silly blogs about life’, depending on my mood.
I recruited my sister and my mother into having blogs of their own, and we kept up with each other’s daily happenings that way, from our long-distances apart.
They enlightened me about text messaging (which was very much a thing in the UK long before it was common in the US.)
It was lovely.
I owned the first generation Kindle (a gadget I had dreamed about for a long time. I drooled over the Rocketbook e-ink reader I got to hold at Book Expo in 1999, and was a huge fan of Amazon’s ‘endless bookstore’ where I could get any book regardless of whether my local chain stocked it). I was an early and eager subscriber to their Prime service.
I had a Netflix account when they used to ship you DVDs in red poly-envelopes.
I’m an early adopter, a fan of convenience, a gadget-junkie, and endlessly fascinated about the potential of tech to change our lives.
For the better, I hoped. But also, it has to be faced, for the worse.
Giving Up Control
When “Web 2.0” and “Social media” started being bandied around I was skeptical about it, because it sounded like what I was already doing. Where was the need?
I jumped onto Twitter, because Wil Wheaton was blogging about how fun it was to have short-form back and forth conversations with a bunch of fellow nerds. And it was.
It didn’t stop me blogging, because how could I possibly live with 140 characters and nowhere to share my photos?
Then Facebook came along.
It seemed fun at first: reconnect with all kinds of people from my past who weren’t nerdy enough to have blogs. It was convenient.
Except then lots of people I knew WITH blogs people on Facebook only, instead of their own blogs. People stopped sending letters (yes, I used to write letters to my friends.) Birthday cards became a quaint oddity.
Gradually, Then Suddenly
And worse than all that: I slowly realized that now I could only see what Facebook wanted me to see.
It irritated me immediately that I didn’t see things in the order they were posted, but in some order Facebook wanted me to see it in.
Then I noticed that sometimes I didn’t see new posts from my friends at all.
Then I noticed that I hated not being able to control what flooded into my eyeballs in what order. If I wanted to catch up with my family’s news, Facebook might give me some of that but interspersed with posts from people talking about books or politics or art. My brain didn’t like that, but it was a dull ache, not a stabbing pain, so I just put up with it, because there was no compelling reason to oppose Facebook.
Now there is.
Convenience vs Conscience
As my kids became late-stage teenagers, they looked at all the smart-devices around our home askance. “Why would you?” they asked.
“Because it’s fun! Because it’s convenient,” we giggled, as people who had grown up when Dick Tracy’s phone-watch was the stuff of far-future science fiction. Video calls were a gee-whizz feature of sci-fi movies.
Except it actually isn’t fun. Or funny. Or functional in any healthy way, anymore.
- The big tech companies are monopolies, who drive small competitors out of business or swallow them whole.
- The tech is being used to manipulate the freedom of information in genuinely Orwellian ways and, as Orwell predicted, most people don’t see it or don’t care.
- The richest men in the world bankrolled the election of another rich, sly-but-not-smart man to the highest office in arguably the most powerful nation on earth (for now), a man who fomented an insurrection, lies compulsively, acts like a narcissist, and declared he wanted to be a dictator (and yeah, he wasn’t joking. He’s never joking. He doesn’t actually have a sense of humor.) They stood with him at his inauguration
The Less Convenient Life
WRITING
This message is coming to you on my blog. Not Facebook, not Substack, not any of the other places that make that age-old promise to writers: write for us for free and we’ll give you exposure.
Exposure doesn’t pay the bills. Exposure is entirely at their discretion (they might hide your word entirely, or push them with their algorithm, but it will never be in partnership with you. Only for their own ends).
This blog is hosted on a server I pay for, and run on an open-source content management system.
And yes, you are reading it while billions of other people aren’t. But that was always true. I am writing this because I want to. If you enjoy it, great. If you share it with friends, great. I’m not doing it for the likes. And I’m not doing it to provide free content to keep your eyeballs glued to some plutocrat’s money-making machine that is actively destroying civil culture.
No more.
Belated, I know. But I circled back to here.
It means that if I DO want readers I’ll have to work to find them. That’s a trade I’m willing to make.
You can download WordPress here and install it on a server (you can use an installer) that you pay for, relatively easily (I’ve used Bluehost, which is fine, and WPEngine which is more expensive and better for me because I have a business site too. These last two links are affiliate links, which means I get a kick-back if you buy from them through my links).
READING
I so love the convenience of hearing about a book, going to Amazon, buying (or pre-ordering) the book and having it magically appear on my kindle.
However. Since Bezos has gone over to the dark side, I have to make some compromises.
Now I am making an effort to buy physical books and ebooks directly from the author or publisher or from Bookshop.org‘s 1site, even though this means I have to manually add the book to my Kindle and it might be harder to read.
I’m also going back to paper books quite often, because when a book is on my Kindle — much as I love the convenience of being able to change the font size, look up when-this-character-first-appeared-because-who-is-he-again, get definitions for words, never have to find the book as long as I can find my Kindle, and never have to use a bookmark, not have to buy more bookshelves– I often forget I HAVE books that I’ve loaded onto the magic-box-of-all-the-words.
The inconvenience of having to remember where I left the physical book, go and find it, and use a ragged piece of paper (or a hairclip, or a feather that fell out of a cushion, or a piece of wool from my current knitting project) is probably good for me.
The convenience of ebooks has always been offset for me by the fact that while I can see how far through the book I am (if I go into the settings every single time and turn on ‘show progress — why, Amazon, why can’t I set that as a global preference?), I can’t feel how far the book I am. And while I love the convenience of being able to change the font and font-size, it means I can’t remember the content the way I can with a physical book that never changes, because my memory learned to snap pictures of physical pages when I was young, and that’s how I remember things: by how they look. Since they don’t look the same all the time in an ebook, I retain/can recall less.
Logging My Reading – before Goodreads I used to use LibraryThing to log the books I owned. I liked the convenience and functionality of Goodreads (especially because it automatically–and kind of creepily–logged books I bought through it’s parent company Amazon), but now I’ve imported all my info into The StoryGraph (whose name I’m having a hell of a time remembering, and I keep having to look up ‘Goodreads alternative’. I’ll get there…) which is not US based 2and has some nice functionality.
Online Content – as mentioned above, I’m using a Feed reader to follow as much online content as I can, and filtering the Substack3 subscriptions into their own folders in my email because I don’t want to be bombarded with a pot-pourri of content any longer.
I’m currently using Feedly, but they seem to be dead set on moving to AI suggestions and a paid subscription model. It’s not complex tech, so I’m sure there’s an open-source free alternative out there and I will probably move to that soon.
LISTENING
Audiobooks – And I’ve paused my Audible account (the one I’ve had since 1998, back when there was only one crappy format, and you had to use a dedicated MP3 player because Apple hadn’t pretended they invented that piece of tech yet), because they’re owned by Amazon.
I’m looking at Libro.fm as a potential replacement. But my local library has a decent selection of books on CD…if only I can find that external CD player I used to have…
Music – Again, I loved the convenience, but I have a working boom box, a record deck and an attic full of CDs. I also have always followed independent artists on Bandcamp and will be using that more.
WATCHING
I recently bought DVDs of the whole series of The Expanse because it was being removed from the streaming service that produced it (Amazon), serving as a reminder that owning copies of things you love is decadent and comforting and increasingly essential again.
(Now I just have to hook up the DVD player again…)
CONNECTING
I’m not going complete Luddite here. I’ve had several lovely 1:1 conversations with friends and colleagues over Zoom, this week. Calls with no agenda. They weren’t meetings, they were just calls.
I have standing lunch and coffee dates with a couple of friends in the real world
I need to get back to more community, in-real-life activities, like volunteering and joining a choir again, and going downtown on First Fridays this summer to bump into people randomly and have spontaneous shared experiences with strangers. There is likely some activism I could engage in, too, in meatspace, not just by writing postcards and ranting online.
Go it alone, together – I went to see the Philadelphia Orchestra by myself a couple of weeks ago, and ended up sitting next to a lovely octogenarian who was also attending solo. We chatted between numbers. She shared her experience of living in a retirement community (members of the orchestra come out and give talks. That made me less fearful about aging and ‘ending up in a home’) and built up my anticipation for the young violin soloist who was coming up next, because she’d seen him before. It was a lovely experience, and one I wouldn’t have had if I’d watched the livestream or even gone with my spouse.
Ok, this probably should have been several blog posts, spaced out over time, but I’m not in this for the clicks, so here you have it. Brain dumped, and easy to access.
Now for something useful, to reward you for reading this far.
Tools
Writing
Instead of Microsoft Office and Google Docs/Slides etc look at Open Office and Proton. If you’re a writer, consider Scrivener4, Dabble, and Atticus, and, if you want to make ebooks, Vellum (though many other tools can also make ebooks).
WordPress – instead of posting free content that someone else uses to monetize-and track your audience’s behavior so as to sell their information or sell to them-consider posting your news on a WordPress-enabled blog and sharing that with friends. If you want to own your own piece of the internet you’ll need a domain name (I use Network Solutions and Bluehost 5even though they’re not the cheapest, but because they’ve been around forever), and a web host (I’ve used Bluehost6 and WPEngine7)
Reading
Bookshop.org shares profits with indie bookstores and you can probably find your local bookstore (if you are so blessed) on there to designate as your preferred one to support. (this link goes to my local bookstore, Reads & Company, in Pennsylvania)
Feedly – click ‘follow sources’, enter the URLs of the blogs you like to read and plug them into this feed reader. This won’t work for things like Substack newsletters you follow, just public blogs. Encourage your favorite writers to go back to blogging! I anticipate having to move to an open-source feed reader at some point as Feedly is in the process of enshittifying their platform
Listening
Libro.fm – an alternative to Audible
Bandcamp – an alternative to streaming services and record stores (hahaha). Heavily used by indie artists.
Sharing/Logging
The StoryGraph – alternative to Goodreads
LibraryThing – alternative to Goodreads, and a way to catalogue your personal library.
For everything else: spreadsheets!!
- Also an affiliate link ↩︎
- It seems crazy to say this, but there is some concern about the government being able to use information like your reading records, search history and email contents against you, which would have seemed like paranoid fantasy a year ago, but now…it seems like having service that are based in countries where the US government would have to work harder to request the information, is probably a good thing. This is why so many friends have switched from Google’s office suite to Switzerland-based Proton mail/drive/etc, even if Proton’s founder doesn’t seem particularly opposed to right-wing nutjobs… ↩︎
- I think a lot of writers who jumped onto Substack are going to regret it the same way they did when they joined Medium and Patreon and all those other services that promise to make it easy for you. It’s entirely possible to recreate the functionality of Substack’s subscription model on your website, with a form and a Stripe payment account. You cannot, of course, benefit from the network effect Substack currently provides, but what happens when people start getting really annoyed about the fact that Substack allows literal Nazis to publish on their platform along with you, or when the owners decide to change their business model on you? Nothing is perfect and you’re welcome to put your eggs in Substack’s basket if it works for you. Just keep backups and export your subscriber list often. ↩︎
- affiliate link ↩︎
- affiliate link ↩︎
- affiliate link ↩︎
- affiliate link ↩︎