Personal blogs are the curated free expressions of peoples lives. Personal blogs are records of individuals trying to make sense of the world.

Links are the windows and doors that stop the capitalist social media from siloing those expressions behind their concrete and rebar walls.

Enclose. Capture. Rent.
Will always be subverted by:
Express. Share. Connect.

Personal blogs are the perfect distillation of all the siloed online publishing channels: the everyday themes and highlights of Instagram coupled with the commentary of Twitter and book reviews of Goodreads, at a leisurely pace with no character limit, hyperlinks and unlimited photos.

Yes, I want to see what you ate for lunch.

Yes, I want your snarky take on this week’s tech culture kerfuffle.

Yes, I want to hear the song you’ve had stuck in your head all week.

I like hearing about the trials and triumphs of other normal people’s lives, seeing what goals they pursue and what they care about enough to write about. I gather book recommendations from others’ reviews, sample others’ taste in music, and delight in the daily wonders of others’ worlds: the cat luxuriating in a strip of sunshine, the stream in the dappled light of an open forest, the neat-looking conjunction of lines on the wall they passed on their morning walk. While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff — the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town — on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling. These small pleasures seem to be offered in a spirit of generosity — this is too beautiful not to share.

Much talk about social media has centered on authenticity, when we all recognize that social media is performative. Personal blogs are where the authenticity’s at. Being self-motivated, bloggers can write about their full range of interests, an openness that’s hard to replicate in offline interactions. (Reading a good blog post and responding to it is kind of like having an awesome conversation with a stranger without having to hurdle the social niceties first.) As an open and self-contained platform, blogs escape many, if not all the context collapse issues of social media. Blogging’s affordances enable a greater range of self-expression and support self-publishing more mediums than do social media.

Read the full post: Building community out of strangers