An interesting part of being in my early thirties has been rediscovering long lost senses of myself... I’ve found them preserved on hard drives, SD cards, and online. In ways only I can experience, they feel like equally familiar and uncanny versions of myself. My old profiles attest to a time before either internet or I became what we are today. And while the “enshittification” of web 3.0 churns on and the world at large looks a lot less coherent than it did in 2008, the durability of blogspot and flickr strikes an emotional chord on a few levels for me.
When I first got online, besides instant messaging and early facebook, my cherished memories of the open, pre-SEO internet included a lot of time spent browsing amateur photography on flickr. In highschool, my roommate and I became obsessed with 35mm photography because I took a photo 101 class, became the studio intern, and got us access to the darkroom whenever we wanted. In the first place, there’s a level of satisfaction from metering, shooting and developing your own photos with only mechanical instruments that’s hard to describe, but with pretty unrestricted access to student grade black and white film and development chemistry, it was addictive for us.
our analog camera collection in 2008 — my flickr
A big part of the fun of taking pictures was sharing it with my roommate. All the constituent parts of the art had so much to offer to our conversations, and at each focal point we clarified our interests in it. He was interested in higher performance optics and modern reflex cameras, in which slide film can perform without making any tradeoffs to digital. I was biased toward antique cameras and daydreamt about their linkage to time in all the different ways. I think we both liked how peacock-y they could be as conversation pieces. But nobody else paid as much attention to any camera in the room as we did— our eyes would go to the device and then to eachothers. It was like sports cars were for some of our peers.
But while you can’t test drive or buy a mercedes when you’re a teenager, it was a lot more possible for us to learn about some niche camera or lens, look up a group for it on flickr, see how it “felt” and then after a quick browse through some forums to check prices, click over to ebay and look for a deal. Of course we’d also do the same thing for equipment we could never in a million years afford. We loved to talk about leicas and hasselblads, even if just to parrot what we’d read on the forums.
Social media has never felt as straightforward and purposeful as it did to me in those days. It was not very long after I had gotten an email address, that I used it to start posting on blogspot and flickr. We were years away from the infrastructure to even allow for the notion of an influencer. Although late in the era, hobbyists still ruled the web. Tech blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget were the nascent form of online commerce influencing, along with the creep of new features unveiled at CES each year. The way we used flickr was almost in opposition to the way that the tech blogs seemed to frame what taking photos or recording footage was.
This was the shape of the internet before it was really known what digital spaces like facebook and twitter were even for. Hipster tendencies still hadn’t been coopted in huge ways yet, although I can see now how near at hand that was. I remember having my mind blown as my roommate and I delved into the forums to learn how the more intricate tools in photoshop could produce well resolved effects that made the digital image look cross processed, or like it was shot on slide film. This was probably five years before instagram and its filters for iphone pics, and eight or nine before facebook bought instagram. But in the meantime, we were in those spaces in a way that really feels like a distant memory these days. Except for the curious cases of flickr and blogspot, where, photograph-like, time seems to stay in place.
Enlargers in the first darkroom that I used
I’m indescribably comforted by these living pockets of hobbyism. I remember how navigating blogs used to work— with lists of peer blogs along the margin of the page— and the way that in those days, the internet and it’s vastness emanated from peer networks hosting what was interesting. You could only find your way to something by knowing about it or knowing about something in the network that knew about it. There was a lot more (not simply a different) delight in finding your way around the place, and your route there felt more tangible and recallable, more singular. I have always remarked on how my ability to recall where on a page in a book a memory can be found, and how this does not translate to files on my computer in the same way. Strangely there are beloved websites that are no longer online that feel as local to me as if in a physical book. Maybe because they’re of the time they were in, and not of all-the-time, the way the contemporary internet strives to be, they’re inside me differently.
Although I’ve left my profiles up, I haven’t been a regular user of instagram in about 3 years now. I’ve taken a glance at it a couple times recently and don’t really recognize the goings on in a way that makes jumping back into the social space of it very tempting. Stranger still is the metamorphosis that it underwent during the time that I was an active user, from 2014-20. In the years before facebook bought the app, it was very similar to blogspot and flickr of 2008. I took formalist photos while out and about in my life and recieved anywhere from 0-4 likes from my dozen or so followers, most of whom were current or former classmates; a very simple merger of pre-newsfeed facebook with a photoblog. As my time on the app extended into the trump years and the app became a social media platform in its own right, an era of algorithmic mass-communication and social capital ensued. Without really recognizing the shift, my own use of instagram became involved more in performing my identity to an audience.
It was an interesting place to work out who I am among others but in comparing that time and how it drifted to my early days on analog photo forums and blogs, the internet of today feels tragic to me. It seems clear looking at it in hindsight, that an imagery-based social media space would be beset by the ways late capitalism uses images and socializing. It’s a hard memory to have personally constructed though, along the lines of “this is why we can’t have nice things”. Not hard enough to dull my enthusiasm to keep me from my seeking online— no in fact the opposite.
The survival of places like flickr, and the archival quality of blogspot, while other giants of the day like tumblr have purged ‘inactive’ users, galvanizes my sense that on today’s internet these spaces are more important than before. They are radically pastoral within the paradigm of today’s internet attention industry. I’m not naive to their lack of appeal to tik-tok and short form video-natives. But quite often ephemera of various kinds will trend in the content of the surface web, driving surges of interest to topics that can only be traced into the annals of enthusiast forums, specialty wikis, and the wayback machine. It’s then that the contrast between realms may be at it’s sharpest, and maybe then that a special elect becomes self aware to the same things I’ve been reveling in. It presents to me a sense that it’s possible.