After a decade of blogging I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what has changed.
The obvious answer is that there are a lot less bloggers. I love and appreciate the people on my blogroll, but social media has sucked in a lot of people’s attention and creative output. That in turn has created some interesting knock on effects. When I started blogging I posted and linked to a lot of debates around femdom. They were centered on topics like the invisibility of the domme in society, the negative perception of submissives, the distorting effect of professional dominance, cliches in femdom porn, etc. Sadly, I’m not sure we’ve improved from a cultural perspective in those areas, but there is less writing about those issues. I think the angst about it has moved to social media and that’s a far more ephemeral medium. It’s hard to capture a serious debate in 240 characters or less, particularly when they’re randomly mashed into a stream of thoughts from dozens of other people.
Another change has been a reduction in curated image and artwork sites. Artists and their fans used to create dedicated sites to collect artwork. Kinky porn companies used to shoot a lot of still imagery and publish galleries from scenes. Now most artists and fans publish via social media and kinky porn tends to focus on video only clips. For someone like myself, with a minor fetish for archiving and collating material, it’s somewhat frustrating. I’ve been less compelled to update my resource links, because there is less ‘permanent’ content to link to.
When I started blogging it felt like the dominant model of the internet was a library that anyone could donate a book to. Now it feels more like a big party house with endlessly swirling conversations, a lot of which feature bad faith actors and paid for guests. Much as I enjoy things like Twitter and Reddit, it doesn’t feel like a healthy change. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and yell at some kids to get off my lawn.
Birthday celebrations should usually be accompanied by cake, so here’s Lucy SweetKill serving one up. I’m not sure this approach is one Emily Post would recommend, but it works for me. Fittingly enough, given the contents of this post, I found this on twitter, via Lucy’s feed. It was photographed by JCPhotoMedia.
Your reflection and perspective of the evolution is insightful and interesting.
I tend to relate everything to the “my circle” concept, meaning I tend to only hold close to me the things that I really value, and let the rest go. My kink life and social media pertaining to kink is no different. I am exclusive to a single domme, and I routinely only follow certain blogs, boards, and websites. In other words, these are “my circle”. I tend to value, focus, and relish in only a few…..and let the rest go. This includes negativity – got no time or tolerance for that. I tend to surround myself with people that share likes and love, especially in the realm of kink.
So, yes, Paltego. You are in “my circle”….and you didn’t even know it! Thanks for your blog, and who you are, and what you do. Again, I find your topics and humor interesting, fun, diverse, and fresh….especially from a submissive / kink perspective. That is rare too. Most is what is available is porn or from the domme perspective. You are so unique, smart, and cool!
Celeste
Thanks Celeste! Limiting your circle seems like a wise choice – particularly online and with respect to social media. I find it can be very easy to be sucked into endless nonsense online and then, when you step back, wonder why you ever bothered to engage and what the value was. Choosing carefully who you choose to engage with – both offline and online – is very wise. More people, including myself, would do well to stick to it.
-paltego
Oh come on, the only thing wrong with being enslaved by social media is that it’s run by men.
As for that lawn, hard to believe there are any children left playing out there. No, not social distancing, kids don’t play outdoors anymore. They’re too busy ‘connecting’ with their 500+ riel friends on ‘social’ media.
Believe it or not, I have occasionally observed the children of friends playing outside. I might have a kicked a ball around with a few of them. When they could drag themselves away from their iPads that is :-). Fortunately, I live on the 24th floor, so my lawn is very much metaphorical, and I’m spared the need to yell at anyone. Although I do occasionally have to gesticulate at the seagulls who perch on my balcony!
-paltego
Well, I’m glad that you’re still going to continue to do what you’re doing.
Social media has distracted a lot of us, and I have to admit that I do a lot of writing on forums instead of on my blog. But that’s where the readers seem to be, so…
Thanks Tom.
I like twitter, but I really can’t write anything significant there. I should probably cross-promote between my blog and my twitter feed more aggressively, but then I think I’ll be annoying people by posting the same thing twice 🙂
-paltego