It’s difficult to believe now, but there was a time when the internet was nowhere instead of everywhere. Before the social internet had mapped so co

The decline of Snapchat and the secret joy of internet ghost towns

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Style Pass

2021-09-07 17:30:08

It’s difficult to believe now, but there was a time when the internet was nowhere instead of everywhere. Before the social internet had mapped so completely onto our social lives that attempting to separate the two or call life away from the internet “real” became a ridiculous endeavor, online was where we went to escape, to be unseen, to be nowhere.

When I started a LiveJournal in 2002, a few of my friends also had them, and more would eventually join. But the point of the thing, the real heartmeat of it, was the strangers there. When LiveJournal was the primary way I existed on the internet, what occupied my time was not my friends’ accounts of their days or their vague, passive-aggressive posts about the drama of which I was already aware. Rather, it was falling into a rabbit hole of total strangers’ personal confessions and vague dramas just as small and unimportant as those unfolding within my own friend group. But these were infinitely more interesting because they were happening to someone I had never met, who didn’t know I existed.

When I made my own humiliatingly verbose and confessional posts, I never imagined the audience to be the few real-life friends who also used the website. I was often embarrassed or even annoyed when these friends referenced those posts in offline conversations. What I loved about LiveJournal, in my early online days, was that it felt like a public space in which I got to talk to no one, a place where I could yell into the void. Putting any part of one’s self online is always a cry for attention to some degree, but sometimes, against all logic, the desire is just as much for the opposite. I want to confess things out loud and be ignored. I want to say the things I can only say if I believe that I am nowhere.