It’s hard to believe but this personal website has been online for over 20 years. Over that time I’ve changed, society has changed, and the world has changed.

One striking change relating to this website is how I view sharing information with the internet. Prior to creating this site, I had a blog on a platform called Xanga (which has been defunct for more than a decade now). I remember how novel and exciting the idea of sharing information with the world was. My friends would write about what they were experiencing, I’d write about what was on my mind, and it was like a shared ledger of experiences connected through a novel technology. It no longer feels like that anymore.

A History of Disconnection

Fourteen years ago on this site I made a post commemorating the closure of my Myspace account: RIP Myspace. At the time I described it as ridding myself of an annoyance, and that was around the time that Facebook became the de-facto internet platform for social connections with friends. Eight years later I authored another post about restricting the harmful influence of Facebook in 2018: Locking Down Facebook. Since then, like Myspace, I have quit Facebook (and Instagram) entirely and feel much better for it. This post is the latest in a long-running series on receding from social media on the internet.

It’s no longer about an annoyance though. Now it’s about preserving what little privacy I can in order to put my attention and efforts where they are best used. Although it was in the past, creating a public persona is no longer on my agenda.

Sharing & Authenticity

An influential factor in deciding that I would quit using Facebook and Instagram was the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma, which I highly recommend. The documentary describes how shallow online interactions have come to replace deeper, genuine social interactions and this was an observation which I profoundly identified with. I’m no longer seeking likes and petty interactions with a broad range of people from my past, and it seems that many others feel the same way that I do (when I closed my Facebook account I described the process to people I wanted to maintain contact with and many echoed my feelings and said they had considered doing the same).

For several years now I have not had much enthusiasm in updating this site because I am reluctant to share too much information with the world. Search engines, bots, and various crawlers are watching. I prefer to preserve privacy and cultivate private relationships more than broadcast a wide net. In that interest, the posts on this site have become increasingly rare.

The Future of This Site

I have no plans to take this site offline. However, I doubt I will ever return to the prolific posting which I did during many of the last 20 years that I’ve been publishing content here. The internet is a different place, and I am a different man now. This publication of this explanation is as much for myself as it is for others; to crystallize my thinking on the matter and commit my thoughts to written word.

Thanks for reading, and maybe I’ll see you in future posts here. Until then, here’s a nice photo of a sunset over a lake which I took.