“Those legacy systems are gone, they’re irrelevant. They are becoming more and more irrelevant by the day. The internet is the only thing that matters. I would say the internet is our default reality now.”
This quote comes from Taylor Lorenz in Chuck Anderson’s recent Pattern Recognition podcast. As someone with a large physical book collection, I would have been more surprised to hear her describe print rather meaningless had I not already read the book. Though as Taylor continued, “No one can delete this now,” which given the history of social media apps that she covers in a social history of the web as told from the perspective of its earliest influencers (or now as VCs call them, “creators”), is important and does speak to the transiences of the web.
It also fits with the book’s thesis: The internet is a revolution that “radically upended how we’ve understood and interacted with the world.” Where many reporters on the internet focus -- the platforms and how various features changed behaviors -- Lorenz takes more of a people’s history approach arguing that it was the “users who revolutionized entirely new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the twenty-first century.”
In many ways, my generation is the last generation to fully reside on the median of this massive fault-line in media. I grew up with books, still read physical magazines, collect vinyls, and my parents still subscribe to three print newspapers. I also learned how to style my MySpace profile page with HTML and CSS, found my first college friends on Facebook, shared Bahner’s “Chocolate Rain” with anyone that would listen, followed the #ArabSpring hashtags on Twitter in 2011, and now need to set a 30 minute timer on TikTok so as to not escape backwards.
In reading this, I realized, I too am “extremely online.” But like Lorenz, I’m also interested in how being online has transformed the power structures of traditional media -- and authority of opinions in general. I’m more likely to follow experts directly, and value the ways in which subjectivity is acknowledged when ideas or retellings of events come from a person instead of an outlet.
Taylor Lorenz does an excellent job of describing how various new social media features (like Twitter’s follow, or Tumblr’s reblog) transformed social relationships. Whether by quantifying online influence, or enabling more curatorial forms of internet surfing, they way we quantify our online life affects how we use it.
In many ways, the new web3 social media sites aren’t really departing from what we know. Farcaster and Lens both feel like Twitter, albiet with different communities and some cool web3-native features like ENS names and collecting. Friend.tech has perhaps taken the most unique departure on creating a social network by making the financial aspect of the app so overt. What should be the metrics for social collecting in web3? The amount of media in your collection, like a digital bookshelf of sorts? The communities you’re part of? A metric indicating the influence you have on what other people collect (or really, read, listen to, and buy?).