Numeral designs from 1904 by Reinier Willem Petrus de Vries.
Monsieur Chat, the tutelary deity of the place with the lower-case French name in affected curly brackets, makes a rare appearance with the news that { feuilleton } is 20 years old today. The blog (a term I’ve always used with reluctance) was launched on the 13th of February, 2006, self-described as “A journal…cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.” The launch date was a random one, being the day that my new website went live, while the decision to start a blog was made not so much on a whim but out of a vague impulse that it might be something worth playing with for a while. Little did I realise… Since these anniversary posts usually involve some degree of stock-taking it’s worth noting how much the media landscape has changed over the past two decades.
Monsieur Chat, for it is he. Graffiti by Thoma Vuille.
In February 2006 MySpace was the biggest social media site, with Facebook climbing fast behind it. YouTube was little more than a year old (and yet to be bought by Google), while the iPhone and the ensuing smartphone era was still a year away. A month after I pressed “Publish” on my first post a new social-media service named Twittr [sic] was launched to little fanfare; no need to recount how that turned out. All of these things contributed in some way to the eventual collapse of blogging as a widespread pursuit, social media in particular, which is another way of saying that I probably chose the wrong moment to embark on such a venture myself. Not that this has ever worried me. I’m cautious about anything that’s liable to eat into time that might be spent doing other things, and it took me a while to see that non-diaristic blogging was a worthwhile endeavour. It’s been a curious thing planting a flag on a hill then remaining there while the rest of the world chases after the latest outlet for their opinions and their pet photos. The micro-blogging format of social media killed the blogs because it co-opted the diaristic impulse behind many of the writing sites of the early 2000s. Social media also provided something that long-form blogs can’t give you: instant gratification, endlessly repeated.
The oldest page at the Internet Archive is from May, 2006, although the header I was using at the time hasn’t been preserved. The Piranesi header has been pasted in from a later page.
The complaints about social media are all very familiar today (it’s a drug, it’s a form of mental poison, etc), and all true to some degree. Recent suggestions that we can improve the internet by a return to blogging strike me as unrealistic. This is an unusual form of activity, one best suited to writers (or to those who enjoy writing), to creative types rather than mere diarists, and to people who don’t suffer inordinately when they throw something into a public arena then receive little or no feedback as a result. Starting something like this today without being part of a connected community like Substack would require resilience to cope with the isolation. And yet… The blogging format still provides opportunities that can’t easily be satisfied elsewhere. Chief among these is long-form writing, so too the static nature of the blog post which resists the relentless churn of today’s internet. I still enjoy being able to set down a few thoughts on a niche subject then have those thoughts (or links or pictures or whatever) easily available online. And the thoughts don’t always have to be delivered in words; one of the attractions of the format was being able to post a list or group a collection of disparate items under a single heading with only a minimum of explanation. The weekend links do this while also serving as a searchable archive of bookmarks. And if you’re running the place the way I do then previous posts are still relatively easy to find, even if the post is a very old one.
The closest you’ll get to a portrait of the author.
In the end, I do all this because I enjoy it, not because it’s another form of work or (perish the thought) “productivity”. Things I’ve enjoyed over the past 20 years would include making and reporting on new discoveries; the feedback from my consistently smart and informative readers; honing my writing skills, then being asked to write paid-for articles as a result. The latter was something I never expected at all. Most of all I value having a small space of my own on the internet, a not-so-temporary autonomous zone. I may be sceptical about a mass return to blogging but I prefer the options to remain open for people sick of the billionaires who regard them as another resource to be manipulated and exploited. Places like this may be regarded as anomalies or hangovers from an older era but the internet remains a malleable environment. The tools to create your own alternative to corporate control are still out there and freely available, all that’s required is the determination to use them.
My thanks, as always, to my readers, especially those who dropped some money in the Ko-fi jar. This site will always be paywall-free but every little helps. And so, as the bouncing cat might say, “En avant et vers le haut!”
John x