For a short while…

I did a short blog series a while back, about things I was wrong about. One of these, inevitably, was the democratisation of social media. I won’t rehash the reasons why I was wrong about it, but it came to mind again last week during an excellent talk by Bonnie Stewart on Reclaim TV. Bonnie set out her blogging journey, and how it played into her PhD and recent work at UHI.

This made me recall the halcyon days of blogging and early social media. Given what has happened since it is tempting to dismiss this as naive foolishness, but I think that is to do discredit to our past selves. There is also an opposing drive to wallow in the nostalgia and how it was all great back then, which ignores the reality of the situation.

It was an exciting and rewarding time to be able to publish and connect with like minds. I recall the thrill of building up a group of Canadian friends online, a country I had never visited, but which held a slightly mythical place in my childhood memories because a cousin of my father’s had emigrated to Moose Jaw and used to send us copies of British Columbia magazine (everyone has killer whales in their backyard pond, right?). The blogosphere felt a very egalitarian space, full of promise. I am reminded of Orwell’s awe at the classless society he discovered in Barcelona in Homage to Catalonia: “There was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching.”

But inevitably there were issues with it then, and the seeds of what social media became were in place already. But if we don’t at least acknowledge the positive aspects then we have little chance of recapturing this in other forms. I’m not hoping for some return to early internet days here, but rather as we continue to negotiate our relationship with technology, we need to have some models, however flawed, to draw upon.

I read Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People? by Clare Dederer recently. She explores a number of artists who we know bad stuff about now, and the different reactions we have to this. At the commencement of the book she hopes for some formula, a resolution that will tell her what to do with this knowledge, but she becomes increasingly convinced that such a solution does not exist. Eventually you will find someone’s art who you can’t quite relinquish. There is no comfortable route instead we have to negotiate with ourselves. It is also dishonest to your past self to simply deny the significance or merit of that artist. I face this with The Smiths and Morrissey. They were enormously important to me as an introverted, unsure teenager in the arrogant 80s. But Morrissey is an absolute shit now (Johnny Marr is still a treasure). But it would be a transgression against my own history and the past Martin to pretend I never liked them anyway. If you don’t have a similar relationship with at least one artist then I would suggest you’re kidding yourself or have just been lucky.

The same kind of reconciliation occurs I think (and will be required even more as we progress) with our relationship with past technologies. Sure, now social media is a tool of misinformation and societal collapse, but at least for a little while, we had us some fun

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