Twenty years ago today, I signed up for a new blog from Blogger. And the rest is history.
Rather literally, in fact. Let’s be honest here, this blog hasn’t been functioning as a blog for the past few years. Few, if anybody comment. Posts come exceedingly irregularly. It’s a far cry from the time when Blogging was the hip new thing, and there was a collegial attitude amongst all the Canadian political blogs out there, NDPers, Libloggers, and Blogging Tories. We’ve lost the sense of community that encouraged me to set up the Blogging Alliance of Non-Partisan Canadians. It’s all Social Media, now.
And truth to tell, social media itself is evolving, and the old voices are fading away. My kids are not on Facebook nor Twitter, nor do they have any desire to be. They run Discord servers, now, and talk to their friends, safe in the knowledge that the generation gap means that parents are unlikely to stumble on their activities.
(As an aside, yes, we do still keep an eye on the online activities of our kids, but we’ve been able to trust each other a lot. The kids have been quite sensible about their presence online, and they know they can come to us with any problems, and we’re able to trust that they will come to us. I know that’s a blessing)
It’s amazing to look back on something that started out as something radical and new, then grew into the Next Big Thing, and then shifted inexorably into a historical curiosity.
Why do I keep this? Well, I don’t think you’d see me throwing any handwritten diaries away, if I had them. These are my words, and these are a record of how my opinions evolved and changed over the past twenty years of my life — even if the record of the last five years or so is somewhat sparse. More than that, it’s a record of an interesting time in my life, where I made a lot of online friendships — some of which are still going in Facebook and Twitter.
So, here’s to history. And I wave to anybody who stumbles upon this curio ten, twenty, or maybe fifty years in the future.