On the Hank Green topic, this is one area where I think social media, but especially Twitter, has absolutely flattened the world, right? I'm kicking 40's door down in terms of age, and when I was a kid the best interaction a fan could really hope for was to send a letter and get a stock response, or maybe go to a convention depending upon your fandom.
Child me would have never dreamt that when I was an adult I would have the ability to reach out to an author when something was unclear in a book and have a halfway-decent chance of having the author clear it up. And not just respond, but there are folks I am a *fan* of who have had whole-ass conversations with me, and 8 year old me is still wowed by it.
I'm actually experiencing what the author is describing second-hand at the moment, as far as thinking about relationships to content creators. My son is almost 16, and got really heavy into Minecraft when he was like 5, and that's when there was this giant explosion of MC content for kids. So I followed a bunch of these folks on Twitter as due diligence as a parent, and never unfollowed them, and it's been a weird, semi-nostalgic emotional journey for me to see these folks who were such an important part of my kid's childhood grow and leave those things behind the same way my son has.
There's another angle to this as well imo - not just nostalgia for content creators you've followed for a long time, but also nostalgia for ways of being on the web that you don't use any more. I have real, crazy nostalgia for the age of forums before social media proper was a thing. There was one poker forum that was hugely influential for my life that I miss dearly. It's still there, but most of what made it good has slowly changed. It was a massive forum though and genuinely produced the coolest stuff, the most talented people. Nate Silver posted there! Some of the greatest poker players ever were posters. Several of the sports betting posters there went on to work in NBA front offices and developed new sabermetrics for the NBA. Me and a few others from the political forums actually made it into politics. Just a wonderful, crazy smart message board.
"There's another angle to this as well imo - not just nostalgia for content creators you've followed for a long time, but also nostalgia for ways of being on the web that you don't use any more."
Absolutely. I'm probably a little bit older than you are, and I don't even feel nostalgia for many things in life, but I definitely feel that for the time period when using the internet was, like, a thing you did during a section of the day...like watching TV or playing outside, and not a permanent state of being. I'm not saying it was better back then or anything, I just sometimes long for that feeling of the time period when our relationship with the internet was a tad less messy. That said, I understand that experience is based in having the internet pretty early, and the expansion of broadband and the internet has led to opportunities for millions (billlions?) of folks who would not have otherwise had them.
Anyway, Happy Memorial Day weekend, Jeremiah. Have a good one.
On the Hank Green topic, this is one area where I think social media, but especially Twitter, has absolutely flattened the world, right? I'm kicking 40's door down in terms of age, and when I was a kid the best interaction a fan could really hope for was to send a letter and get a stock response, or maybe go to a convention depending upon your fandom.
Child me would have never dreamt that when I was an adult I would have the ability to reach out to an author when something was unclear in a book and have a halfway-decent chance of having the author clear it up. And not just respond, but there are folks I am a *fan* of who have had whole-ass conversations with me, and 8 year old me is still wowed by it.
I'm actually experiencing what the author is describing second-hand at the moment, as far as thinking about relationships to content creators. My son is almost 16, and got really heavy into Minecraft when he was like 5, and that's when there was this giant explosion of MC content for kids. So I followed a bunch of these folks on Twitter as due diligence as a parent, and never unfollowed them, and it's been a weird, semi-nostalgic emotional journey for me to see these folks who were such an important part of my kid's childhood grow and leave those things behind the same way my son has.
There's another angle to this as well imo - not just nostalgia for content creators you've followed for a long time, but also nostalgia for ways of being on the web that you don't use any more. I have real, crazy nostalgia for the age of forums before social media proper was a thing. There was one poker forum that was hugely influential for my life that I miss dearly. It's still there, but most of what made it good has slowly changed. It was a massive forum though and genuinely produced the coolest stuff, the most talented people. Nate Silver posted there! Some of the greatest poker players ever were posters. Several of the sports betting posters there went on to work in NBA front offices and developed new sabermetrics for the NBA. Me and a few others from the political forums actually made it into politics. Just a wonderful, crazy smart message board.
"There's another angle to this as well imo - not just nostalgia for content creators you've followed for a long time, but also nostalgia for ways of being on the web that you don't use any more."
Absolutely. I'm probably a little bit older than you are, and I don't even feel nostalgia for many things in life, but I definitely feel that for the time period when using the internet was, like, a thing you did during a section of the day...like watching TV or playing outside, and not a permanent state of being. I'm not saying it was better back then or anything, I just sometimes long for that feeling of the time period when our relationship with the internet was a tad less messy. That said, I understand that experience is based in having the internet pretty early, and the expansion of broadband and the internet has led to opportunities for millions (billlions?) of folks who would not have otherwise had them.
Anyway, Happy Memorial Day weekend, Jeremiah. Have a good one.