I started this wee newsletter-meets-blog two years (*gasp* it does not feel that long) as an experiment in anti/alternative social media. There’s been a wave of writing about teen girls, depression, and social media, and I’m no longer a teen girl, but I am among some of the first young adults who are grappling with the unknown effects and outcomes of growing up chronically online.
I’ve had a phone that could access the internet (even in limited capacity) since I was nine years old. And carrying my laptop, my iPad, my AirPods, and my smartwatch in my everyday carry has been the norm for the majority of my adolescence and young adulthood. And I’ve had some form of social media (whether my mom approved of it or not) since I was ten years old. And so has almost everyone else I know who is my age.
For almost my entire life, at least the parts that I really remember, my life and the lives of my peers, have been reflected on social media in real-time. It wasn’t always about curation of online personas, and at one point, it wasn’t even about sharing everything going on in your day-to-day life, but technology, the internet, and social media have made capturing and curating moments and turning them into content second nature.
There’s lots to unpack about intentions in social media use and the different ways that people my age are using it. I have some friends who post once a year, friends like me who primarily use it to interact with stories1, friends who are mini-influencers, friends who have separate private pages for photos that are not deemed “main worthy” and thought dumping more like a journal that your friends can comment on.
I have experimented so much with different ways to utilize social media, in particular, Instagram, which is where the majority of my peers post content and engage with content. Gen-Zers, at least in my communities, rarely use Facebook, and Twitter is less about posting for traction and more about liking memes and keeping up with popular culture. But Instagram is where we keep track of life and keep just in touch enough with our thousand+ acquaintances to feel like we are still in community with people we have not seen or had a substantial conversation with for years. And Instagram is good at this— making you feel somewhat close to people who you never actually engage with in real life. Even if the interactions are superficial or surface-level, the structure of this pseudo-community makes it feel, if not a reflection of your real-life communities, but a community in and of itself.
But at the end of the day, even with the delightful and meaningful interactions I have with others through the app, I cannot shake the overwhelm it brings to my life. Even when I’m using the app intentionally, it creeps into the quiet moments of my day and fills them with noise. And it is exhausting.
Before the infamous Quarantine Summer, I’d deleted my social media for about 9 months, and with the growing itchiness of disconnection that covid brought, I downloaded TikTok and eventually Instagram again. And about a year after that, I was desperately looking for alternatives to connecting with others that was not traditional social media, but that could mimic the kind of pseudo-community that traditional social media platforms do so well.
I deleted my social media again and focused my efforts on curating a digital garden and what would become this newsletter-meets-blog. The short and sweet of that experience is that the digital garden felt like speaking into the void and I was struggling to figure out the purpose of a newsletter if I really didn’t have that many updates to share. In the end, I ditched the digi-garden, but I still felt like the newsletter veered on self-centeredness. What I really wanted was to be able to share about my life, my thoughts, but also connect with others about their lives and thoughts.
What I really wanted was for LiveJournal to be a thing in 2022.
As I began writing my monthly newsletter updates more like personal essays, I started to get email replies or texts from friends striking up short dialogues about points in my newsletter. Now, I’ve convinced a handful of my friends to start their own newsletter-meets-blogs and I love getting to read their insightful monologues and talk to them more intentionally using what they’ve shared as a touchpoint.
And really, I wish I could see more of this amongst my peers. I want their blogs, podcasts, vlogs, songs… all of it. Literally anything deeper, more touching, and more truthful than one of forty pictures taken just to post. The friends of mine that have started blogs (or newsletter-meets-blogs) and podcasts and vlogs are sharing in ways that they don't share on Instagram, for example, because the medium calls for more than an image with a cheeky caption or brief thoughts on a reposted story. I learn so much more about friends I've known since 8th grade in their experiments in alt-social-media, and it’s not just because they’re sharing more or more often.
It’s not that a blog could not be highly curated or otherwise problematic in ways that traditional social media can be, but there’s something special about the intention and vulnerability of personal writing as a medium that we don’t practice often anymore. Especially in the attention economy created by traditional social media, it is rare to engage with fully fleshed-out thoughts and ideas from your peers. Writing takes time and energy, thought, and intention. I love reading a thoughtfully pieced-together blog from one of my friends and noticing the effort they took to think, write, and share. Traditional social media can be thoughtless or at least significantly less thoughtful, and I appreciate my friends’ creativity, intention, and courage in choosing to share this way.
But really, I find the blog to be more fun. I don’t believe in the death of long-form writing, and I think we should challenge the attention economy where we can. I think we all should be flexing our creativity and vulnerability muscles more often, and if blogging is a way to spark joy, reject assaults and shrinking of our attention spans, and practice creativity and connecting with others, then I say we should do it.
I was too young to participate in LiveJournal, so maybe my perspective would be different if I had gotten to experience all my friends oversharing and shouting into the void. Maybe there is something also to say about the detriment of access to each other’s lives and thoughts, as well as how permanent sharing on the internet can be. I am aware of this on traditional social media platforms, but especially so as I bare my heart for free on this open platform that I’ve created.2
Maybe there will come a time when I read back through my blogs and disagree with things I've said, and maybe one day, someone will attempt to weaponize my words against me, but that's a risk I'm happy to take. I hope that I will look back on my well-documented 20s and have changed my mind about some things. I hope I find myself dramatic, tender, and silly. I hope I find myself honest and courageous and invested in practicing truth-telling.
Anyway, here are some of my favorites from my friends who are living in their LiveJournal eras:
A Lump in the Throat by Mary Shelley Reid
Forward Notion by Farris Steele
Miss B.’s School for Girls !!!!!!!!!!!!! by Maddie B.3
It’s All Happening! By Hali Wyatt
Linds Out There by Lindsey Jacobs
Dearest Karen by Karen Mims
I’m still not sure what the future holds for me and social media. It has only been an increasing concern as I'm getting older, and one that many people, not just my age, are wrestling with. In the wake of the great AI takeover (a blog for another day) and as our lives are almost unlivable without screens4, I do wonder what connection, community, and creativity look like outside of screens or at least in some middle spaces between what we know as traditional social media.
Some of my friends are creating their own spaces for community and connections IRL by hosting intentional celebratory and reflective gatherings in their own homes (So strange to be old enough to have your own place?? When did this happen?), others are hosting and attending book clubs and writing workshops virtually and in person, and some are planning what they hope to be a yearly retreat for women and non-binary folks. Really, these are things that have always been done, but I have seen less intentional acts of building community and sharing life with friends, neighbors, and strangers in recent years, and I think there is a call to create and invest in these spaces as we find ourselves more and more drained by tech.
For now, as I’m very far away from many of the people I call my friends, neighbors, and community members, I’m especially intrigued by the blog as a platform for self-expression and connection, and selfishly I hope more of my friends find their way into blogging so I can read what they have to say. :)
For those who are not versed on Insta-language, stories are posts that are only up for 24 hours and are quickly consumed. People tend to share posts, memes, and other bite-sized media there. It is separate from the content of your main feed, which people tend to highly curate. Stories are less curated, typically, but not always.
A couple months ago, a blog I wrote about my largely disappointing experience with the rowing team got sent around, and I ended up hearing from the co-captain saying she’d been sent it multiple times and wanted to chat. Awkward! Lol!
Yes, thirteen exclamation points! Haha
This feels so dramatic to say, but really, it is growing increasingly difficult to navigate day-to-day happenings without a smartphone. I can’t even access my school email without pinging my phone for authorization.
I had a Xanga during the livejournal era. I would do literally anything to retrieve the weblog ramblings of my 7th grade self. After that, we all migrated from MySpace bulletins (the original “posting” space) to Tumblr, which devolved into a horror show. I’m hoping substack has a staying power these others didn’t -- and hopefully it can be cringe-resistant. In the meantime, I’m loving it. Thankful you’re blogging!!
asha this is so beautiful! So happy to exist in this space with you <3