Elon Musk has ruined social media, but I might also be partly to blame.

Writing on the internet, for me, began with bulletin boards in the early to mid 1990s. I progressed fairly quickly to Usenet, gravitating toward rec.radio.broadcasting and meeting some people there with whom I seemed to share not just a common interest, but also sense of humour and, broadly speaking, outlook.

Before long, I was spending time in what Howard Rheingold called “Virtual Communities”. In fact, after dabbling in The WELL for a bit, it was a new community of Rheingold’s that I joined: Brainstorms. It was 1998. I had to apply and it required some sort of consensus approval of my credentials, which were fairly limited, but with a little minor embellishment (slight exaggerations rather than outright falsehoods), they appeared to do the trick.

The classic New Yorker cartoon truism applied: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Once I successfully passed as ‘the right sort’, I began to get a sense of the kinds of social behaviours that were acceptable or expected. And while I hadn’t thought of it this way until very recently, it was here I learned how I liked to be ‘on social media’ (though virtual communities and social networks do differ in a number of ways). I was chatty, generally sympathetic, watched others for cues and joined in when I thought I got the gist of the running joke or shared cultural reference. There were plenty of good role models for this at that time – and not just an optimism about the kinds of communities that can be formed in this way, but a positive determination.

If a technological social utopia could be formed by force of will alone, we would absolutely not be where we are today. Rheingold’s electric neighbourhood was entirely paved with good intentions.

Around that time, I also started and moderated an email discussion forum in Google Groups called NZ Radio. That kept me entertained and busy for a few years, but as things became somewhat fractious and more often work than fun, I managed to offload it to Paul Kennedy – regular poster, broadly of the same mind and, as keeper of the pop charts, sufficiently tangential to the industry to approach the task of moderation with a degree of impartiality I increasingly lacked.

I started blogging in 2002, if I remember correctly (an increasingly pertinent, though likely redundant, caveat these days). Blogging was different. It wasn’t contributing to themed conversations, but more of a monologue. A soliloquy.

I approached blogging more like the kind of journalism I’d attempted back in my youthful days writing for the likes of Rip It Up, Smash Hits and other music outlets clearly short of talented scribes prepared to exchange prose for vinyl. My style, to the extent that I had one, could be described as conversational, funny enough to make you smile but not actually laugh, fairly unevenly edited, broadly under-researched and only occasionally registering as authoritative to any degree. This was the late 80s and so fortunately, nobody seemed to mind.

I do have a very clear recollection of where I was at the time blogging came into my life and who was, if not responsible, then at least salient and therefore blameable.

Russell Brown had spoken to my third year students that day and was explaining the shift of his Hard News segment from radio feature to what appeared to be some sort of online ‘Dear Diary’.

I was in my 15th floor office of the Faculty of Arts Building on the corner of Queen Street and Mayoral Drive in Auckland City, overlooking the Central Library, Art Gallery and the adjacent lower slopes of Albert Park. I was Degree Leader for Radio in the School of Communication Studies and, unlike during my later and more senior academic posts, I had the privilege of a nice view.

I also had a viewpoint and, now, a platform. Like most things that seemed at the time a democratising force, these also probably came more under the banner of privilege.

I effectively exchanged those floor to ceiling windows for Windows 98. The vista seemed more expansive. I started on Blogspot as The Wireless – and years later, I migrated to my own name domain.

Fast forward to 2005. Now in the UK, I started New Music Strategies – a separate and more active blog dedicated to helping independent musicians, labels and other music industry types operating under their own steam and dealing with the realities of a post-Napster world.

New Music Strategies provided me with a space to try out the ideas I was experimenting with in the academic domain, but in a way that could actually be useful to someone. It was there I composed the Twenty Things You Must Know About Music Online as a series of posts. I compiled them into a free ebook that was the closest I’ve ever come to “going viral”. CD Baby’s Derek Sivers got his hands on it, and gave it to all 50-odd thousand active members of the site. It spread from there – and closest estimates had it at around half a million downloads by the end of 2008.

I never made money from blogging, but I certainly made some money and had experiences I could not otherwise have afforded because of it. I started getting invited to speak at music industry events: at first around the UK, then further afield. Blogging took me to Chicago, New York, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Marseilles, Genova… and contributed to adventures in Brazil, India, Colombia, Venezuela, Uganda and beyond.

Everywhere I went, people were encouraged or inclined to read the blog (a far less niche activity than it is today) and, from there, download the ebook.

Perhaps most significantly, 20 Things somehow ended up on the San Francisco desktop of Ethan Diamond, who was in the process of establishing Bandcamp. He got in touch and we started working together. Long story short, that ended well.

In addition to starting New Music Strategies, 2005 was also the year I recorded my first podcast, ostensibly as a piece of practice-based research, though perhaps in reality more an exercise in self-amusement (this was something of a hallmark of my academic career and I exploited the overlap between ‘things I enjoy’ and ‘things that count as work’ even more than is typical of those who populate the domain of Media Studies). Having moved to Birmingham the year before, I teamed up with an equally curious and even more successfully authority-shy and protocol-averse colleague to test the nascent audio distribution waters.

Dubber and Spoons Take The Bus was exactly what it sounded like. James Debenham (‘Spoonford’ or ‘Spoons’ on various online forums at the time) and I lived on the south side of the city in Moseley. Our employer, the University of Central England, was on the north side in Perry Barr. We entertained ourselves with deliberately and self-consciously inane conversations on the two-bus journey home from work. North to City, City to South.

Podcasting involved recording some of those dialogues using the most rudimentary of early portable mp3 devices, and putting the resulting file, more or less unedited, up on the internet.

There was certainly nothing that could have been considered remotely ‘radiophonic’ about the production. There were some technical elements that involved a little HTML coding and I remember there being much discussion of RSS enclosures. In fact, I believe that those discussions formed a significant part of the content of the ‘show’. To loosely paraphrase McLuhan, the content of any new medium is two or more men talking at length about the mechanics of that medium.

“Podcasting is not a category of content, it is a method of distribution,” we insisted.

The Buscast was approximately as good and as bad as you could expect something like that to be (that is, not especially). We garnered something of a following, achieved a mention in the Guardian newspaper as an early example of podcasting (a “top 9”, which suggests they couldn’t actually find a tenth) – and we were covered in an “and finally…” local BBC TV news report.

As usually happens with these sorts of ‘fun at the time’ ventures, we eventually ran out of steam. Much of the podcast series remains online, thanks to James, now based in Australia. It would be nice to think they represented podcasting’s equivalent of the Alan Lomax folkways recordings. Mostly, I think they have, at best, lasting value as historical audio documentation of just how deafeningly rattly West Midlands double decker buses were a couple of decades ago, rather than for any quality informational, techno-historigraphical or entertainment value. Again, my recollection is untrustworthy, but I seem to remember talking about Batman a fair bit.

It wasn’t just podcasting I was messing about with in its earliest incarnation. I was, fairly predictably, a social media early adopter. Tom was my friend, which is to say, I was on MySpace for the entirety of its doomed lifespan and predicted (or perhaps willed) its inevitable demise. Let’s not forget that there is already a pretty high bar when it comes to trashing a popular social platform through billionaire hubris and crushing stupidity.

I was on Facebook fairly early on too – pretty much as soon as it became available beyond the confines of Ivy League US colleges. It became quickly apparent it was not for me, and so I deleted my account after a relatively short while, only re-establishing a presence in 2013 while trying to make a documentary in Brazil. Local contacts informed me that this was the only platform anyone would ever use to speak to me – and I’ve been more or less trapped there ever since. There are some people in different places around the world who I genuinely care about and am interested in, and while many of them would be surprised to learn they have something in common with South American revolutionary political activists, Facebook is the only place they appear to exist and communicate.

After an initial dalliance with Hipstamatic and a blossoming interest in photography, I signed up to Instagram just slightly too late to secure my preferred ‘dubber’ user name, having to default to my perennially disappointing backup handle with a first initial included.

I don’t particularly enjoy Instagram. You’d think I would. I like taking photos and enjoy other people saying that they like them. I like looking at other people’s photos and seeing the faces of friends. I particularly like seeing people I like having a nice time. I really enjoy seeing cats, dogs and otters being cats, dogs and otters. But the rapid current of that timeline’s stream sweeps them all away before anything resembling actual appreciation can occur. Also, despite my lifelong interest in narrative, I don’t understand ‘Stories’ at all. I’m assured this is an age thing, which seems entirely plausible. But I do feel that Instagram excludes me somehow.

I have absolutely zero idea how long I’ve been on LinkedIn. I have, it seems, successfully blocked out the majority of my experience on that platform, though I suspect my initial registration would probably have coincided with the beginnings of my disillusionment with the world of academia. I’ve never sought alternative employment there, but as corporate and superficial as the site has always seemed to me, there wasn’t really anywhere else that would accommodate that sort of online career daydream.

However, it’s fair to say I don’t like LinkedIn. Nor do I trust how delighted people say they are to announce the things that they announce, nor find credible their purported excitement about what is fundamentally just them doing their job – a job, it should be noted, that they are likely on LinkedIn in the hopes of changing.

I joined The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter not long after it started – 2006, or at the latest, 2007. It has not only been my preferred social media environment ever since, but also my primary means of communication with the majority of the new friends I formed in my thirties and forties – something that moving to the other side of the world inevitably entails.

It’s also been a welcome anchor to home, especially through the no-admittance pandemic years. New Zealand Twitter is often the very best of Twitter. It absolutely ruled through earthquakes, eruptions, lockdown, the most progressive political landscape in living memory and a veritable Aotearoa renaissance in music, art and culture. Throughout, people who were effectively acquaintances when I lived in Auckland became very good friends long after I left.

By dint of my early platform adoption (there weren’t that many people to follow at first) and as a result of having some measure of internet profile acquired by writing about online music at a time when this was an, if not hopeful, then at least not yet entirely demoralising endeavour, I managed to acquire something in the region of 10,000 Twitter followers. This seemed a quantification and reflection of my New Music Strategies readership, but there were other people here too. A lot of them. Not “fame”, by any stretch, but something else. A semblance of significance, perhaps.

As you may have gathered, I was trained (to the extent one was ‘trained’ in the late 1980s) as a radio broadcaster. One of the things they teach you in radio broadcasting is you only ever speak to one person, never to an ‘audience’. I used Twitter a bit like that. So I only ever had one of two main intended recipients in mind: either a) an imagined reader, singular; or b) the actual, real, living human being that I was conversing with.

I spoke to the second of these far more often than I spoke to the first.

Several people I now consider to be among my closest friends are people I got to know on Twitter first, real life ‘meatspace’ later. On several occasions, including one ‘Birmingham Twitter Christmas Gathering’ I organised at my local pub, I actively engineered physical co-presence with people I seemed to like on Twitter. We even swapped gifts. I made mixtapes for attendees. It was quite lovely and everyone who came was someone I could imagine inviting for dinner, if I’d been better at that sort of thing.

While never anywhere close to perfect, for a while Twitter looked like it was managing some of the rose-tinted ambitions of Rheingold and his happy band of cyberhippies. It was a good time with good friends.

My friend Clutch and I hosted live social media whisky tastings (@twhisky, naturally), which, for a while, turned into a bit of a thing that saw us invited to distilleries, having reasonably hair-raising adventures on remote Scottish islands, drinking altogether too much extraordinarily rare and expensive whisky and eventually co-authoring books about the stuff. It also spawned a life motto: Ordeals Beget Treats. More about that… probably elsewhere.

My friend Stef and I started an imaginary ‘silent radio station’ (@twadio – because, what else?) – a bot that every fifteen minutes would Tweet out the name and artist of a song guaranteed to instantly give you an earworm. It was intended as a sort of psychological ‘Greatest Hits’ format, provided as a service (to your colleagues and co-workers, presumably, who didn’t have to actually hear the music that was only happening inside your head).

At its best, Twitter was a fun, experimental place for smart people with ideas to try out. A place for thinking out loud. A place I could hang out with people more expert, more talented, more impressive or more thoughtful than myself. The kind of place I have always sought out, both in my personal and professional life. In fact, it’s the single connecting thread in my entire career.

At that particular moment in history, the people I liked and who amused me – and, perhaps more importantly, that I occasionally seemed to amuse – were all on Twitter. And things actually happened because of it.

Early Twitter had a declarative ‘ status update’ element to it, particularly when it came to notable breakfasts and haircuts, but mostly we just used it to make each other laugh. I haven’t done the analytics on this, but at a guess, 75% of my contributions were replies to other people. These were people I worked with, people I socialised with, people I actually knew, at least on the internet.

I thought for a while that my experience of Twitter, while perhaps not universal, was at least quasi-typical. Friendly, often delightful, sometimes incredibly useful and frequently hilarious. Eggs Benedict and the occasional barber shop visit aside, I could never really get my head around common complaints frequently encountered in Twitter’s relative infancy about it being a platform merely for inane chatter and dull commentary. I thought we were rather charming.

As Steve Lawson once noted: “Twitter’s not crap – you just have boring friends.” Which, in retrospect, sort of meant that (at least, during that particular iteration of the service) curation was *your* job. You simply need to find and follow people that don’t disappoint you. And those may or may not be the people you associate with in real life. If anything, Twitter was useful in revealing something about those people – and about your real life.

It was eminently possible to make good decisions about whether you wanted to spend time with someone based on whether you would happily follow them on Twitter. And the reverse was also true. For a time, “Have I had a beer with this person?” was the litmus test for whether I would click the ‘Follow’ button. I once instigated a “just one celebrity” rule, and if I wanted to follow another, I would have to unfollow the first. I had a “no more than 100” rule. Then a “no more than 50” rule. To this day, I would argue that the best way to experience Twitter is only ever to follow people you actually, genuinely like on Twitter. At the end of July 2023, I had that number down to under 30.

The Twitter of the past few years has been far more interested in relieving you of that responsibility of personal selection. It’s fair to say this has been the overarching cultural project of the commercial social internet over the past decade: the engagement metric given precedence over, say, things you appreciate or simply enjoy (or enjoy simply).

Pandering to the lazy and incurious was the spark, the leveraging of outrage as the driver of engagement was the flame, and Elon Musk was the tanker of gasoline backed up to the fire and emptied all over it.

Musk’s eight buck blue tick Twitter has successfully replaced discernment with its opposite, giving timeline priority to the sort of people you might cross the road to avoid, to say nothing of inviting them into your home to listen to their opinions about, say, women, cryptocurrency or immigration policy.

More than enough has been written about the clown car dumpster fire of Musk’s Twitter. I don’t need to go into any detail. You’ve either been immersed in it or have been standing at a distance watching in horrified disbelief like an ex-pat Brit sitting in Sweden observing Brexit play out one preventable socio-economic catastrophe at a time.

My favourite analogy is that Musk has bought the Titanic and is trying to hit as many icebergs as he can on the way down.

But if you’re the captain of a sinking ship, haemorrhaging cash and losing whatever cultural capital you may once have possessed by casting an electric car adrift in space (as far as possible away from a charging station, if that was the intention), then apparently what you really want to do is to attempt a global rebrand worthy of a particularly unpopular 14 year-old who got a technical drawing set for Christmas.

Or perhaps it was X-mas in the Musk household.

But with that, I’m out.

I’m out of Xwitter. Of Facebook. Of Instagram. The lot. Musk is not ruining social media, he’s exemplifying it. He is the embodiment of the opposite of what it originally looked like it was going to be all about, but would inevitably turn into. It’s called reversal and it’s what always happens. And so I am going to do what we have always done with an X symbol at the top of an application. I’m going to use it to exit. Turn it off. Shut it down.

I’ll miss it, of course, but it’s not really 2023 social media I will miss. It’s 2008. And there are plenty of other things I’m nostalgic about from 15 years ago, but which I have satisfactorily replaced with other, probably much better things. Time to do the same here. Let it go.

But, and so here’s the thing: Elon Musk is not why I’m leaving social media. Nor is the absurd X branding thing. They are the occasion, rather than the reason.

The reason is this: I imagined I was good at thinking and communicating in tweets. I was once also good at thinking and communicating in essays. One is something I have always found entertaining. The other… I don’t know. Edifying?

I feel in danger of having lost one by overindulging in the other. I’ve not only neglected blogging in recent years – proper, essay length blog posts – but I’ve felt incapable. Twitter became my primary and eventually my sole mode of online sharing.

And the irony is that I’m not especially good at sharing. God knows how many tens of thousands of tweets I’ve composed (I refuse to open the app again to look) – but if you read them all you would learn startlingly little about me. If anything, those were just the noise I made online to prevent having to say anything of real substance.

To peruse my social media, you might conclude that since 2008, I have had a handful of very nice meals, listened to some jazz records and thought of some jokes.

In truth, over those past 15 years, I’ve experienced what has seemed from a first-person perspective a non-stop rollercoaster of defining episodes, encounters and occasions for learning.

You’d perhaps have thought along the way, as someone known to be quite verbal online, I might have said something about my divorce to a woman I was with for over twenty years. Or made some reference to my relationship with my non-binary, vegan, married and separated, artist adult child, to whom I have been a parent (with varying degrees of success and with many stories to tell) for over 30 years.

Or perhaps my central defining love story: the ‘second time around’ relationship that has changed my life more times than I can count over the past decade, four years of which we have now spent happily married with every day an adventure (and frequently a deadline) of one sort or another.

I could have talked about my reasons for leaving academia. For leaving Britain. For living in a forest. The novel I started and abandoned. The non-fiction book I’m rather proud of but have been halfway through writing for over five years and will likely never finish. My journey with photography. With cooking. With DIY.

At the very least I might have said something about the 9-year nightmare renovation of a 200+ year-old farmhouse and the accompanying legal battles with builders.

I could have made some reference to the nervous breakdown I experienced in Berlin, the kitten born with its stomach on the outside, the close friend who died suddenly, the advanced dementia of my mother, the multiple hospitalisations and heart surgeries of my octogenarian father, the suspected ongoing criminal activity of one prominent public figure and absolute innocence of another, or maybe just the significant personal financial windfall that led to a two week vacation in the Maldives, where I gained my Open Water diving qualification.

My life is, at least to me, quite interesting. Interesting enough, at least, to reflect. Interesting enough to have stories to tell. Increasingly I have tweeted as if it isn’t. If I stayed on Twitter (or whatever) that trend is likely to continue and accelerate. The more I post, the less it was worthwhile having done so.

As I write this, I am on a small boat moored off a rocky island in Croatia during a severe and deafening thunderstorm and have just today been gifted a 2000 year-old amphora recovered during this morning’s diving expedition. There’s certainly a lot to talk about on very much an ongoing basis.

And yet in all these years as an active and reasonably well-followed Twitter user, I’ve said very little of it. Pretty much none. Again, social media is not how I say things. It’s how I talk to prevent having to.

Nowadays, my ‘compose a draft and immediately delete’ to ‘actually post’ ratio is around 10 to 1.

By giving me a platform to say whatever I like to thousands of people whenever a thought popped into my head, Twitter has helped me become quite a private person. Gregarious, perhaps – and forthcoming with the music recommendations and frivolous chit chat – but private nonetheless.

Tweets for me are ephemeral fragments. Conceptual confetti that disappear in the wind. The best you could learn from me on Twitter over time is whether or not we’d enjoy sharing a pint and engaging in small talk.

So then, walking away from the platform (all of those platforms, really – but mostly Twitter) represents a profound shift in my media environment. It’s a moment of rejection of this performative ‘thinking out loud’ in favour of ‘thinking things through’.

And this right here is, by far, my preferred form for that. I’d call myself an essayist if I wrote more of those. And while I have plenty of evidence to suggest that I am not suddenly going to become prolific, I have enjoyed and, more importantly, appreciated the best part of a week in which, on and off, I’ve composed, edited and reworked this single piece of writing.

Nor is everything I write going to be public, as it always was in my social media days. I no longer have to restrict ‘things that I write’ to ‘things that I want everyone to be able to see, regardless of who they are’.

It’s already a strategy I’ve adopted with my photographs. Wherever I go, whoever I go with, I take pictures. I edit and then post the ones I like privately on Flickr as a sort of photo essay. If you were also at that event (or should have been), or if I happen to be married to you, then I will share the album link.

There may one day be photo essays I end up making public. But likewise, there may well be a predominance of these essays that I don’t share at all.

Once again, to butcher McLuhan (something I used to do professionally, but nowadays revisit more as a hobby), any significant media shift involves not only obsolescence, enhancement and reversal, but also retrieval.

Let’s attempt to retrieve. Twenty years ago, I was blogging. I liked blogging. So here I am again. Not to engage, but to write. As I mentioned, where appropriate, it will be available here to read, but that’s secondary. An imagined readership is an added incentive to clarity and, to the extent possible, an avoidance of self-indulgence. But the writing is the point. For me, in contrast to social media posting, it’s not just thinking out loud, contributing themed puns on movie titles or alerting all and sundry to a new vinyl purchase or my latest head shave and beard trim.

Writing and posting like this here is not what I think, but how I think.

Whole thoughts, fully formed.