What happens next after Facebook?

I just completed a long day at work in my new job. I worked on the Downtown Mall to get ready, and felt charged by the snow falling. It's winter now,  my favorite season, and I wanted to just watch it happening while I prepared two public comments I made at the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors meeting.

I didn't want to put the above on Facebook, but that's the kind of status update I used to feel comfortable rattling off without any thought. When I joined the site, I was a reporter for Charlottesville Tomorrow. I think. I think that was back in 2008 or so? At the time, I had gotten so used to posting on this blog, which I consider public record. What I have written on this site since 2005 or so is a document of my life during that time. 

I stopped posting here on a regular basis a long time ago. I would post items to Facebook, in part because I wanted a larger audience. I wanted to communicate to more people than I could reach here, and I wanted interaction. This blog didn't have the reach, and so I stopped nurturing it for the most part.

I did post on Facebook today that I would consider just writing on my blog again if for some reason I needed to leave the site. I won't go into detail about what those reasons might be, except to state that I have grown less interested in writing candidly to an audience on a platform that I trust less and less with my information.

Even though I'm 45, I still consider myself a digital native. I have been online since the late 1980's when I finally figured out how to connect a modem to the phone line at my family home in Lynchburg. Even younger, I knew that our Atari 800 could connect to the world through things like Compuserve, but we couldn't get a device to work properly. My dreams of being connected to world were dashed for a while, but even then I was aware that there was a brave new world ahead of us.

When the modem attached to the PC, I quickly learned about the bulletin board systems that were hosted by other people in town. In those days, long distance calls cost money, and long distance was anything outside of your city. So in high school, I got to meet other nerds and geeks from across Lynchburg, expanding my universe through a combination of online and offline interaction. 

Thirty years later, I think many of us have the online interaction down, but the offline interaction is lacking. So much of our public discourse seems to be in little white boxes, in conversations that seem like shouting. And all that conflict has seemingly been monetized by corporations that appeal to our basic human need for connection. 

And here I sit at my front room table, writing this and not even knowing if anyone will read it. I don't have to worry that that one person who hates winter will take the opportunity to tell me I'm wrong for enjoyment of the cold. I can acknowledge that I am no longer a reporter, or worry that someone will take that opportunity to take a cheap shot at me. 

I am guilty of writing a headline about something this post is only tangentially about. I don't know what happens next after Facebook. I do know that I will post here more, even if no one is reading. 

I ran my own bulletin board in high school. I called it Dead Letter Office after my favorite R.E.M. album. I did it as an experiment, and somehow that translated into me entering into the field of communications. I don't have any of that archived, but I used to write comedy bits and I had a platform to mess around with language, and to try to be playful. I wanted people to laugh. 

I did tweet just now that I was able to prove that I was part of an interconnected network called FidoNet. I loved the idea of being connected to a larger world, and that was the beginning of my career, which has taken me to a very different place than I ever expected. My life has always played out on a digital canvas, and I was always trying to experiment. 

And now here I am at a time when all of us are connected to the digital canvas. I prefer to think that most of it has been for good, and I don't think we can go back to a time where we all have an opportunity to express ourselves to friends and strangers. We all want to be part of something.

I know I still do. 

I sit here at my front room, alone after a day around people, about to pass through an important milestone in my life, and I like the idea to post something into the digital ether. 

And after I post this? I'm going to go to my journal and write things I'll never post here!