The Future of Social Media is Going Back to (Raw) Blogging.

The state of social media in the present is saturated with filtered posts and carefully written description that portrays what the sharer intends to, a far cry from the early blogging days wherein everything is raw and evocative of passion.

History of Blogging

Justin Hall created the first blog called Links.net, while he was studying at Swarthmore College in 1994. The term “blog” will be coined later on but for his web page, he referred to it as his personal homepage.

His blog is still active up to the present time, it’s poignant and fervent. It contains social commentaries and life’s journals that highlight the story itself, no flashy photos, or filtered imagery. Your brain processes the rest.

One of the earliest blogs on the internet is Robot Wisdom, created by John Barger, who also created the word in 1997 “weblog” which means “logging the web”. In 1999, Peter Merholz shortened it into “blog”.

Rise of Blogging

Blogging then proliferated the web as it was popularized by the platform Blogger — this was in the early 2000s. In-depth commentary blogs and investigative websites grew at a monumental rate that even the late Steve Jobs addressed this at the D8 Conference:

“One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press…. Some of these papers — news and editorial gathering organizations — are really important. I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now. Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other news gathering organizations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their news gathering editorial operations intact, I’m all for. What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard-earned content. So [the tablet industry] provides us an opportunity to offer something more than just a web page and to start charging something for that. I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they traditionally charged for print because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume. I think people are willing to pay for content.”

Times have changed and although there are still a handful of news organizations that remains impartial, it certainly been proven that in recent time, independent blogs and Youtube channels have been providing incredible, raw insights pertaining to social events and other world issues.

The Return of Blogging

Times have proven that everything that has turned into the mainstream will someday be humbled by a scrappy idea. In this case with social media such as Facebook and Twitter, including Instagram, they will be met by a classic antagonist, blogging. It already started in photo dominated platforms such as Instagram wherein the caption section is treated as a blog post, this creates higher engagement due to authenticity.

Interestingly, a lot of influencers nowadays have invested on a personal website giving them more control of their platform, often redirecting Instagram followers to their website for the full post.

The proliferation of filtered images and focus on the highlight reels have an expiration date because people can only tolerate highly-stylized content for some time until it becomes a nuisance. After all, the hallmark of the internet is for people to have a platform where they can be raw on their opinions and perspectives.

The popularity of long-form content often goes in crescendo and diminuendo during the digital age. It definitely took a back seat when Twitter came into prominence and short-form content took off but then podcast skyrocketed and all of a sudden, content creators embraced the long-form content again.

The future of Social media/network

In a world dominated by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat wherein almost everything you come across is either filtered, fake, or manipulated — this is the present, the future is gearing towards raw content, not merely the highlight reels but also the mistakes and failures.

The whole journey, not merely the landmarks.

The entire story, not snippets.

The holistic person, not merely strengths.

The future of the Internet is authenticity.

Blogging pioneered unfiltered perspectives, blogging will commence the renaissance period of social media (Yes, we are still in its dark ages) because people would always come back for relevant content despite being sidetracked and distracted by a hundred Tik-Tok videos.