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Where did the 2000's...AKA My 20's Go?
Category: Blogging
Current mood:
 nostalgic
Listening to rock from the 2000’s and feeling bored one night, I began looking through long forgotten files on my cloud server. First it was the files with old writings such as blogs and music I had written in my mid-20’s. But, as I explored further, I came across a ton of old pictures as well. Pictures of old friends, old loves, the cool places we hung out, and all those damned band photos. Pictures of a life that somehow seemed like someone else’s life rather than my own. Reminiscing about those days, I began looking up old social networks that were once a huge part of my everyday life. Sites, like MySpace, have totally changed to an unrecognizable format and a very user-unfriendly interface. And, others, like Friendster are now simply just gone forever. Even my old AOL and Yahoo! IM accounts no longer existed. It seemed as if my entire old online life died along with the rest of what made the internet a cool and hip place to be.
In my desperate search to find some semblance of the creativity and individually of those sites, I came across friendproject.net. An interesting cool little corner of the interwebs that is a “clone” of the old MySpace I loved and practically lived on in the 2000’s. On Friend Project (okay, the name could use a little work, along with the site itself), I can post almost everything I once did on MySpace within the same format. I can customize my profile with HTML codes, post and comment on friend’s pages, write and read blogs (which I was doing on an almost daily basis back in the day), share music, take surveys, and more. And, as I was virtually reliving my 20’s, I couldn’t help but wonder…What exactly happened to the internet being cool and individualized? Has the corporate conglomerate reached gotten so long that they are now infiltrating every aspect of our lives? And, when did we just roll over and accept that basic formats are simply the way things must be? When did we become so…generic?
In my quest to find the answers to these questions, I find that I’m not only one asking them. Several articles I found tended to ask the exact same questions. In the “Age of the Reboot” could it be possible that some of these long dead ideas and sites be “rebooted” for today’s world as well? Could we see a resurgence in individualism on social media?
It seems even on much smaller and less well known platforms such as (the aforementioned) Friend Project, Reddit, Minds, Twitch, Vampire Freaks (which has been around forever), BitChute, and many, many more, users are gravitating to in them droves! The trend of the mega-corporate sites appears to be on a rapid decline. Users are demanding more individual freedom to express themselves with much less corporate interference and influence. As the trend towards freedom of expression expands in our online lives continues, what will happen to these large social media sites in the next 10 years? Will they go the way of the “new” MySpace…Hard to use and seemingly pointless? It will definitely be interesting to watch.
However, this almost 40 year old still longs for the days of easy customization, freedom of expression, and free to be the same badass rock chick she’s always insisted on being…despite what the mega-mainstream thinks she should be.
Always rebel. Always rock out. And, always...ALWAYS be a free individual!
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