Should you have a website?

When you are on your third hour of doomscrolling for the day, and it doesn't seem like the catastrophes will ever end, do you feel seen in the targeted ads? Do you find that the app or service for therapy and mindfulness tailored to your needs outweighs whatever it is you just saw? Do you click on the comments section, is that ever a good idea? Is it ever anything nice? Do you know anyone in there? Where does that pit in your stomach lead to?

Last year I gave up on social media. As much as I could, and it wasn't just me. Whether it was Gaza, Charlie Kirk, neonazis rallying in out backyards, or just the experience of enshittification, the fun of being online has come to an end. If you're in the half of the world that developed an addiction to social media, there's been no better time to curb it (Newport 2025). It's very hard to cut off every app, every tool, I know some who have done it, but I just can't get away from those sweet facey marketplace deals. Shamefully, I still get sucked into Twitter, though it's getting easier to resist these days. At this point, I have spent years and years, years of my youth, sharing shit, making embarrassing posts, crying on camera, status updates, please react, snap streaks, and I could never be bothered enough to do it again. No more tweets.

We should never forgive the oligarchs, the politicians, the capitalists, for the consequences of unchecked social media. As power consolidated to a few websites, as human thought squeezed into burning plasma, destroying meaning and knowledge, the profits went up, and we were happy enough, so the exploitation of daily life continued. In some ways, we've found ourselves forgetting how to think. The newspaper has been superseded by stories of the world mostly shared in the context of online opinion, we are given a billion viewpoints before we even get to consider our own. Our language is changing to revolve around feelings of manipulation and conspiracy (Phillips 2025). When we write on social media, it is in response, but it is not a dialogue (as in two-way communication, you send out a message and get a message in return), but kenophonia^[1], that is to say empty and vain noise, with no object or objective. We are screaming to nothing.

That is social media at it's worst. At it's best, and really as it is meant to exist, it was a collective memory. We had records of weddings and funerals and even first kisses, we capture the tone of every summer. Sometimes we did reflect in winter, and we shared deep, long thoughts. This still happens sometimes. Before I quit Instagram, almost once a week or more I would have some silly rant or video or photo I would put out, mostly jokes, but sometimes a small lecture. I would research, I would develop a point of view, and often a punchline. I liked doing this, but it could only ever capture an aspect of me that can talk fast and funny.

A little while after I stopped posting regular funny little instagram stories I was stopped in the street by an acquaintance who said they had loved watching my life in little clips, and with it gone they felt a little bit of loss. It was nice, to know that my little moments of rambling had actually made at least one person laugh, a little happier, a little connected, even if I hadn't known. But when a small few stayed a little longer on an app owned by Mark Zuckerberg because I posted something, that fucker got just a little richer, didn't he.

And it wasn't really me, was it! Sometimes I, for fun, was playing a character online. It was based on me, they were real stories that I told, but the medium is the message. My Instagram stories were 10 second fragments seperated by two screens. On my end was a screen that I knew would reward me if I made something engaging, it would react, it was addictive. On your end was a screen that placed my fragment into the fragments of the rest of your world. When we construct social media this is what we do, we give little pieces of us to an algorithm that will create a world for everyone who has ever followed you. And you have no say in just what that world is made up of, or it's purpose.

What, then, is the alternative to kenophonia? For a start, it's reading. I am saying this as someone who almost flunked english in high school, I don't know if it has ever been more important to not just be able to read, but read critically and deeply. Because anyone can read an AI summary-and indeed that might just be what the majority read from now on-but reading is the experience, the enlightenment. You should be reading and deeply thinking about what you're reading for long periods of time. If you read widely, even better, I'd personally say it's best to ignore most of what's marketed or blogged about, instead spend a day at a bookshop sifting through blurbs (Rothman 2025). If you can't read, how did you get to this point, but also it's never too late to learn. If there are people in your life who can't read, and you are a nice, encouraging person, it's never too late for them to learn to read either! Reading is resistance.

As you read, you will reflect! Brains are sometimes like a hall of mirrors, if you let anything reflect up there, it goes on forever into haze. Writing is how we solidify thought (Schimel 2012; Brown 2018). For a while last year I forgot this, and without it I felt a little lost. When news came my way, I had no way to anchor it to my reality. With no anchor, I felt astray, I felt dread. It was so easy to fall into rabbit holes made online, to become hateful. But I found things, that I had written before, and I remembered. I remembered the strange ways I found optimism, or inspiration, in the bleak. I did cringe sometimes, but that's part of the fun. If you choose to write, form doesn't matter, content doesn't matter, it is the action of finding your voice that is guiding. No one is going to be marking you, maybe no one will even read if you don't put it online! Should your writing be online?

Not really. I don't think. Some of the most treasured things I have been priveliged to read from friends have been letters, shared torn pages of journals, zines, birthday cards, old assigned essays. If all the writing you do is intended for the internet, it becomes shaped by it. What I am writing now is shaped by the internet. It is shaped by the fact that it is the first post (hopefully of many) on my personal nook of the web. Like my stories on Instagram, I am not just writing for myself in here. I am hoping others will read this. But I have secret poems and essays and stories, some I think would be impossible to share. And you should too, find your voice away from any algorithm.

So you should write to yourself, for yourself. But, if you have the time and the energy, I do think you should have a website. Before the current era social media there was so much expression on the internet. Even Tumblr and Myspace allowed for a little pzazz when it came to your representation online. I miss seeing how people chose to share their art, their words, without some predefined platform. There was so much aesthetic diversity^[2], and I want it back. So you should make a website, and you should send it to me. Think about it this way: if you miss blogging, would you rather put it all up on a website like Medium that gives you basically no choice in terms of vibe; and puts your writing next to the race science gazette, or would you rather have a fuckin sick animated logo with little fishes swimming around it^[3]. I know what I prefer.

So I made this website. I've been telling myself to do it for ages now, but there's never been a big enough deadline around the corner for me to procrastinate by learning website making. At the moment I really should be getting some results ready for a conference presentation, but here we are! I hope I can get all the bits and bobs working, it'll be a slowly growing process. At some point I thought this should be somewhat professional, that's immediately gone out the window. I have some plans for future posts, most are nothing like this. For example, I was really hoping to at some point write a blog post that is really good. Bye!

references

Brown Brené AKA girlboss, 2018, Dare to Lead, Ebury Publishing.

Newport C, 12 Sep 2025, On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society, https://calnewport.com/on-charlie-kirk-and-saving-civil-society/

Phillips JB, 01 Apr 2025, 'Exploring Psyop-Based Conspiracy Theories on Social Media', Information, Communication & Society, vol.0, no.1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2483827

Rothman J, 17 Jun 2025, What’s Happening to Reading?, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/whats-happening-to-reading

Schimel J, 2012, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded, Oxford University Press.