Zinzy Waleson Geene

Person, Principal Designer

The old sharing

I published this piece quite a while ago. Though I enjoy the art of public record-keeping, you should know it may no longer reflect my views.

I am nostalgic about the way the Web used to be. I miss the handcrafted blogs that I used to visit, and the intimate windows they gave me into the lives of strangers.

I miss that I knew all the domain names by heart. It is a phantom pain of sorts; an unrest in the tip of my fingers reminding me I no longer need to make series of key combinations to find those personal public spaces, some more arts-and-craftsy than others, because most of them are gone. These days, I just circulate through a small number of news sites, like I did when I first got online as a young girl, not yet having found my way around the Internet.

By now it is such a cliché to even say it, but I don’t like the monolith that we’ve become. I detest your Instagram feed, which is a highlight reel even when it isn’t. Twitter is a garbage can. To me, it was never just about your content, it was about your form, too. About the typographic choices you made (Lucida Grande or Tahoma), the kind of camera you used, and the frequency of your updates.

I suppose the bottom line is that I just feel bored about the Web. I think I may have spent so much time navigating it through social media that I’ve lost my way around the blogosphere. Which these days, ironically enough, is the name of a company specialized in influencer marketing.