This is mostly about the internet. I was going to say it's all ads without being ads and then trailed off reveling in how messy it used to be. And then realized my point was this: it feels like the whole experience of most popular websites purports to be about the user but is really about the advertisers. This isn't just me being bitter about ads, but it is a little bit.
I remember the early days of most of the social media we use now. I remember leaving long comment threads on friends' posts on facebook in high school, laughing until I cried and then referencing the jokes the next day. I remember facebook being a tool to share photos and updates and thoughts with friends. I remember watching my sister use instagram in its early days when it was just people taking photos of their latest craft project, their outfit that day, a picture of the sky, of their coffee, of their food, of them with friends- the stupid kind of stuff you capture when you're young. I also remember when snapchat was just about sending photos with one line of text and no knowledge of whether they'd been screenshotted. I remember the early days of youtube, and how the videos would look and the kind of content that would be put up.
All of the early days of this was very odd, ugly, clunky, and not always user friendly. Things were slow and buggy much of the time, not that long ago. Images and videos were low in quality and limited in quantity. It felt like things had limits, like the real world was still more interesting.
And then COMPANIES got a hold of these things. So many facebook pages and accounts and instagram pages are just companies trying to advertise. Sometimes this is your favourite local restaurant but more often than not it's a major fast-fashion or subscription box company. Sometimes it feels like nobody has a website anymore. Things got easier to use, and faster, and higher in quality, so more and more content was put up. Content wasn't always guaranteed to be there forever (stories) so now you had to check things to see what your friends were up to, and people were more likely to put content up knowing it would go away shortly (myself absolutely included). Out of nowhere you were supposed to use your real fucking name and image on everything, everywhere, all the time... to make ads more targeted for you. And now that your real self is up there, things you do online have real-world effects. Sometimes for good. So make sure you define, curate, market, and sell yourself. For your benefit.
The side product of all that is that if you are going to spend all this time, money, and energy doing that, you want it to be picture perfect. I feel like things aren't as messy. In the early days of youtube there was nothing but people using shitty cameras to film at their local park with costumes they made themselves with no skill, and now it feels like anyone making content must have perfection. High quality cameras and microphones, stylized outfits and aesthetics. No mess or ugliness anywhere. It feels different getting a beauty standard from millions of young people hyper-paranoid about their own image than it does getting it from movies and paparazzi magazines of famous people who you know have oodles of time and money. Doesn't it? It must.
Nothing is actually for the user anymore, it's all about money, content, information to sell to advertisers. I'm so tired of it. I miss when the internet was ugly and new. Maybe we should all log off and do a bad craft and take unfiltered pictures with a disposable camera to show to no one.
