Let’s face it guys, social media isn’t what it used to be. What happened to just having a social media account to stay connected with friends and family? Why are we now being flooded with a constant stream of content by strangers, political pages, sponsored ads, and podcast bros? Social media was supposed to be a space for us to have a personalized online presence and to stay connected with people we actually like. Now it feels like we’re tiptoeing past a grouchy parent sleeping on the living room sofa trying not to disturb them before they ground us for waking them up.

I feel less and less connected with people I know with every new social media account I create. After the mass migrations from Twitter, many scrambled to find a new permanent internet home. But, as with any toxic environment, we’ve all basically got one foot out the door waiting for the next best thing to come along. Interacting with strangers on the internet used to be pretty fun! Back in the days of online chat rooms and the early days of Twitter, making new friends around the world felt like an adventure. Now it feels like running through a mine field yelling at strangers to watch out and being forced to engage in verbal combat with some random maniac in Nazi gear. What the fuck even is this? This sure as hell isn’t Al Gore’s internet!

Perhaps it’s time to bring back the personal website. Perhaps it’s time we start carving out our own virtual space and bring our individual creativity back to the world. Long gone are the days of MySpace, but if we all could learn to code with nothing other than our own ambition to best our friends with a better background and cooler music playlist, we could surely do it again. Hell, we all still check our emails don’t we? Our emails, equally as annoying as our social media accounts, filled with spam and a bunch of nonsense we’ll never read or bother deleting. Honestly, I would love to passively scroll through to find a random email from friends and family just saying hi.

Really, when you consider that the content we provide to all these different apps are not even really our own, how quickly we can be flagged and have our accounts deleted, years of photos and memories gone forever (it’s happened to me), and for what, so Elon and Zuck can make big bucks advertising to us? These social media companies make money off of what we contribute to their apps. Then what do we have to show for it? Playing “now you see me now you don’t” with internet trolls, blocking and unblocking, privating and unprivating! Aren’t we tired yet? Having a personal website and making sure all your content originates from your own site means that you are in control of your online persona and your content. It also means you can contribute something to the internet without subjecting yourself to a constant stream of raging internet warriors jumping down your throat because their reading comprehension is crap.

Welp, maybe it’s just time to rethink this whole internet thing. Maybe it’s time to take a bit more control over what we put out and what we take in. That’s how I feel about it anyway. I’ve had this website for years, it’s mostly been a place I used to write about the world as I see it and post event photos for clients to download. Recently I decided it was time to revamp this old thing and make it a useful tool and foundation from which I can plan and build. I’ll still be writing about the world, and maybe I’ll get back to event photography someday, but for now, this website is my creative project. I hope that people who find it, may too feel inspired to carve out a space all their own and claim their corner of the internet.

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