Twenty Online Years

I was struck by Dave Bonta's blog post this week, noting the 20 year anniversary of his blog.  I was struck by many aspects of this blog post, particularly the idea that we might not any of us be here to be blogging in 5 more years when the blog will turn 25:  "I won’t say I’ve lost all hope, but I do think it’s an open question whether any of us will be around for Via Negativa’s 25th. Authoritarianism, runaway militarism, and severe inequality make for a volatile mix even before you factor in the multiple environmental crises we face. Things have never been more grim."

Those of you who know me know that I have an imagination that runs to apocalypse.  Still, I give us more than 5 years, barring something like a nuclear blast on the level of those depicted in The Day After or Threads.  We could survive a Hiroshima or Nagasaki level blast because there would be unaffected populations that could help.

I was surprised, however, at how much everything broke down during COVID.  If that disease had killed more quickly and/or had killed more people at midlife than older people, it would have been much more of a challenge.  I was also surprised by how quickly supply chains came to a halt.  A different kind of pandemic emerged, one with a mortality rate like the Black Death of the 14th century (or if MERS became more easily transmissible), it's not hard for me to imagine the end of humanity.

I fear I've given the wrong idea about Dave's blog post celebrating 25 years.  It was less doom and gloom than it was some nostalgia for the past, along with determination to keep going.  I love the way the blog post ends (I started to type "wins," which also works as a verb here):   "Thanks to all who read here or share links with friends, and thanks to my friends and colleagues in what we used to call the blogosphere, especially other members of the Class of ’03, who were such grand company in those dark times. We started online magazines and played with free online tech to make poems in new ways and shared strange thoughts and hand-made things, and from time to time compared notes on the enormous lights and mysteries that still fill the earth."

I was not blogging as early as 2003; I didn't start blogging until 2008, but I was reading blogs in 2003 and it wouldn't be too long before I started thinking about creating my own.  That was back in the days before social media influencers, days when regular people thought, what on earth do I have to say that is worthy of being recorded online?

I was intrigued by all the online opportunities that were developing, new places to publish poems.  And to this day, I still get more feedback from online publications than from publications in journals.  When I first started submitting to online journals, they seemed much more ephemeral than print journals.  No longer.

I'm also still intrigued by all the ways we can use technology to do things that once would have been impossible if we didn't have very expensive equipment, from taking high quality pictures to doing lay out, to having wide distribution.  Those who want to do so have many ways to stay in touch with fans/readers.  And we can create such new kinds of hybrid work that wouldn't have been possible for many of us, like collaging of word and image, or collaging of word, image, music, and/or video.  Some of us are creating things that might be less like poetry and more like something else that has yet to be named.

I think about my undergraduate days, twenty years before the birth of Via Negativa, when a desktop computer for a regular user seemed very far away.  What a long way we've come.  I wonder what the next 20-40 years will bring?