I was a teenager in the days before Vine — right before Vine, I should say. Vine was a big thing when I was a young college student. (I remember trying to film Vines at Bonnaroo, which was another experience that defined that stage in my life. Both of those things shaped the bulk of my personality back in 2013.)
We had Vine, sure, but we didn’t have lots of ways to watch what other people were up to. We could read blogs or Facebook posts, but the world of vlogging? That was definitely more of a niche thing. I’m sure there were vloggers, but the world hadn’t yet pivoted-to-video. At that point, we couldn’t even post videos on Instagram.
We watched MTV, if we wanted to see real-life eccentricity. (“Eccentricity” covers a lot of territory: the delightfully-eccentric good, the cringeworthy bad, and the maddeningly wild.)
MTV even came to my super-country high school to audition someone for True Life or Made, or one of those reality shows. They decided not to film at our school. I don’t know if they couldn’t find anything worth filming, or if something else happened. But we didn’t miss our turn in the spotlight. A couple years later, a television crew from another country came to our school to film a specific club, because said club won a national championship. That was a cool experience.)
There were other shows that appealed to our desire to watch people do bizarre things. We didn’t have ice cream so good, but we had trashy television. We watched things like To Catch A Predator and Jerry Springer. Two of my high school classmates even acted on appeared on an episode of Jerry.
I didn’t go with them, so I never got my beads.
We also watched a lot of YouTube skits. In the era before people filmed their beauty hauls, their skincare routines, and their video game play-throughs, people filmed annoying skits and posted them online. Two of my friends and I even got together to plan a bunch of silly YouTube skits, which we wrote scripts for, but never filmed or posted. And that’s a shame, because both of these friends are artists. One of them is a professional photographer, so the videos would’ve been high-quality. But I know I’m not a natural-born performer, so … I’m glad there isn’t video evidence of my bad acting.
The kids who visited Jerry? They were stars! They got beads!
This was back around 2010, 2011, 2012. We didn’t have Vine. We didn’t have TikTok. We didn’t have Twitch.
All of that stuff is new. And I see this evolution as a good thing, because … I’ve decided I’m going to try get ahead of the curve. I’m going to turn my focus to the Generation Alpha and Generation Beta demographics. But first, I need to convince them that ✨blogging✨ is cool. Blogging is it, baby!
When we bring back the pre-Ice Road Truckers Weather Channel, just to have something vaporwave-y vintage to vibe to, we also need to bring back Blogspot-style blogging. The general vibe of that era, from 1999 to 2009, was fascinating. Those were the original years of realizing things. And I want to revisit that era. I want to convince everyone that blogging is the next big sphere of influenceability.
I want to stumble upon a Bulgarian math teacher’s music blog. I want to scroll through an uptight Mormon woman’s recipes. And I want to read about what’s happening to a random design student in Toronto, or Berlin, or Lagos.
I don’t want memes or filters or trends. I want to read confessionals, I want to read workplace/classroom gossip, and I want to read poorly-written poetry. I just … I just want to read someone’s diary.
I want to stare into your blog, baby. Is that too much to ask?!
Jamais Mayville 