Would I still blog if I was brought up with today's social media?
Re: https://journal.jatan.space/would-you-blog/
If you were born and brought up in the time of modern social media, where Twitter and Instagram have always existed, would you even blog?
I'm in an interesting position to answer this question. I searched up the launch dates for a few of the social media platforms we consider prominent today. They are from around the 2000s-2010s.
Now here's the thing. I wasn't born after the advent of these platforms, but I still grew up within the times when these companies were just getting started and growing the initial user-base, for two reasons: first, I grew up in a country that was still catching up to the global phenomenon that was the internet, and second, my parents had imposed strict rules to my gadget usage for most of my childhood. I was constantly informed by the school and by parents of "online safety and privacy" and all the ways social media and phones is "bad" for the youth.
I eventually had to use social media due to peer pressure. But for some reason, I didn't use it and enjoy it the same ways my friends did. I rarely shared personal pictures on stories and never participated in those silly TikTok challenges. Instead, I wrote about news I cared about, books I enjoyed, science I was passionate about. I would write down my thoughts in what my friends back then would call the "essay format" and post those big walls of text instead. Pictures and media alone didn't appeal to me as a medium for expressing my thoughts a lot of the times. As I expected, barely anyone cared, and posts with media got the most engagement.
Naturally, I drifted away from posting to socials, using these platforms just for catching up with friends. I started to write elsewhere, and eventually turned to blogs.
Would I still blog if I was brought up with today's social media? If I was given a similar education that piqued my interest in books, articles, and writing long-form, then yes, absolutely.