It’s Old Man Blog time again, just sitting here quietly on the front porch of the blog. Not only has the neighborhood gone downhill, the whole dang city has left for the bright lights of the social media mall.
Does anyone remember the so insightful writing of Mike Caulfield, written on his blog, you can go there, step on the veranda with an iced tea and read The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.
I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.
I don’t expect to convince many of you, but I’ll take what I can get.
https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
That 2015 vision of vibrant gardens intersected by flowing streams seems in 2025 so… pastoral. The gardens are desiccated, demolished, paved over, and the stream? Well it’s a raging mile wide turbidity current that has swept everyone away.
What social media has left is the act of being on the web mostly a passive experience. You only read what is served to you via the stream, be it an algorithmic one or just chronological. It’s all PUSH.
In a recent Reclaim Hosting community chat or maybe it was Reclaim Live, long time colleague Mark Corbett Wilson, who has bravely been building his own techno-home, talked about the need to use tools to publish his stuff everywhere, to all the social channels. Streaming to the stream.
And that’s also why the big move to email newsletters, be it the dreaded stack or Ghost whatever, the approach is the same – people will read your stuff only if you spray it into their inboxes.
I think we are truly missing out on the web where I, as a reader, make a visit to your site or place. This is te active tense web. It’s like visiting your home, knocking on the door, maybe having a conversation on your porch or the back yard. Or if you are not home, I will peek in the window and see what’s new, and leave a comment tacked you your door.
To Old Man Web, there is a huge different of making the choice of where I go to read, watch, than having it sprayed all over me (I consider the act of RSS feeds the same, I make the active choice to add a feed).
I have no hope at all the gardens will return, those days are gone. And I am not just a hermit, I will dip in the streams and sample things, look for sparks. But even then, I don’t just wallow in the flow, I go upstream to the source, rummage around the site where a link in the stream lands.
So what happened to all the blog / web homes? Left behind, abandoned. Many have been scooped up and covered in ads for casino traps and bit coin cons.
Everyone has gone to the Social Media Mall. Include Mike- I see some posts from him, but he;s gone all substacky. I still read his stuff. And I will refrain from bringing up that fedwiki thing 😉
My Own Malling Past
I’ve lived in the pre and post era of the “mall” concept. I have my mall chops, eh? I can remember just the image as a small kid living in the Liberty Heights area of Baltimore and my family going to Mondawmin Mall. As I understand, this was the second in the concept of transforming the traditional outdoor shopping centers, to an enclosed place of shopping wonders, the idea of James Rouse (who later conceived Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and the planned city of Columbia Maryland). It was an outdoor center in the 1950s and the process to convert it to what was replicated all over the world starting in 1963.
i just remember the awe of the front entrance, it was all glass. In the summer you’ve go from the muggy heat of Baltimore to the air conditioned coolness. It was like something out of a futuristic novel (Mondawmin sadly had a later downward spiral of decay and violence, that does not change the feeling I remember).
My other Mall touch point, and where I draw the analogy, was the Mall my friends and I would hang out with in high school, by then my family had moved just out of the city. The mall to be at was Security Square Mall named for its proximity just down Route 40 to the massive national headquarters of the Social Security Administration.
All the cool kids went to Security Mall, to be seen hanging out in the food court and shops. That was not for my group of nerdy high school non conformists. We hated that culture (we were on the fringe of high school society).
No, our thing is now embarrassingly stupid to admit. To thumb our noses at the Mall Kids, we would drink alcohol in the parking lot, and go inside, drunk, to sneer at the cliques, with the notion no one would know were were drunk at the mall.
One more history note on that mall I hung out with– it was one of the key locations used in the innovative first season of the Serial podcast. Of many places you can confirm this, it comes up in reddit.
Like I said, not quite proud. But then, and to some degree now, that corporatization of the shopping experience, the artificiality of the lights, design, decor, were antithetical to all I wanted to be. Still.
So to me, this idea that no one will read you, or look at your writing, unless you send it down the stream to the social media mall, is, well no different from how I felt from Security Mall.
And indeed, I will never amass a viral following or much more than a handful of friends, accidental readers, and of course, a good amount of bots, spammers, and now regular AI scrapings.
But I will welcome warmly those who wander to my remote corner of the web, right here, and make the active choice to visit, not just because it was sprayed into the stream.
It’s not one of the other, it’s not garden or stream, but the landscape is quite different when its so domiated by the stream.
Have fun at the mall. I might pop in an “look around”. But I will also be here in the porch, and I will make my trips to visit yours.
Featured Image: Porch Dog flickr photo by robholland shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
Here’s me lookin’ in yer’ window at Felix. Leaving a note on your door. Remembering a story of my brother who once lived out near Whitemarsh Mall, Perry Hall MD back when that place was hot stuff.
I would look out the balcony of his apartment out over the “fields” that had been plowed up, leveled and terraformed into a vast open area. And my brother telling me about one Thanksgiving where he stayed there at the ol’ bachelor hermitage out near the Mall. And how isolated, and silent it all was. Even pre-Internet Days. He was near the Mall, but you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t walk to it (no sidewalks or paths through the fields to the Mall) the opposite of Columbia MD post-Rouse development days.
Once my brother moved INTO the City and was IN a neighborhood with (now gentrified) townhouses and door stoops,… it seemed way better. I’ll take a neighborhood over a mall any day of the week.
I like so much Eric the shared Baltimore references! The year before I fled the east coast for grad school in Arizona, maybe 1986, I shared an apartment with 2 high school pals (part of the anti mall gang) not too far from Whitemarsh- it was just off of the beltway on the Philadelphia Road. I think it was called Rossridge.
Did you ever go to Olde Philadelphia Inn (OPI)? That was one our regular spots.
I really appreciate the thoughts here. I have had my ups and downs with malls, with social media, and also with porch blogging. The latter not “down” in any way except that I don’t do as much lately as I would like. For the mall, I stopped posting a lot and mostly just read, which isn’t really contributing much to the ambience but I also find I don’t so often feel the need to broadcast so widely. One of the nice things about my blog, which hardly anyone reads unless I do post on social media (which I don’t do that often) is that it feels both a bit cozy and homey because it’s mostly for me, but also occasionally other people may read it, which is nice too. Not very many, mind, and pretty much no one if I don’t post on social media. But that’s okay too, as it’s a great place for me to be with my thoughts and make them a bit more honed before sharing widely. Kind of like sitting on a porch being mostly quiet but nodding gently to a few passersby.
Thank you for the opportunity to reflect and share a few thoughts on your porch! (which I hear about through an email every time you blog, which is nice too)
Hi Christina- I still visit your blog, and I count on your RSS feed to light up in my reader. Then I likely will visit. Some would counter that’s it’s not much different than announcing posts in the socials…
Still I appreciate the posts you write, your ones on AI last year were very helpful. And I see reading blogs as very valuable even if the writer never knows you were there, it’s still a real visit.
I hear you on all of this, including the metaphors I’ve gleaned from Mike over the years — not only the garden and the stream, but maybe even more impactful, his idea of “choral explanations”.
Even though I participate in the social media streams often enough, I still maintain my blog/site at https://xolotl.org and try to publish anything bigger there.
Part of what keeps my tech chops up has been maintaining and migrating that site for more years than I would care to count, which I believe is a core activity in developing technical literacies. Just having a domain of one’s own (DoOO shoutout) leads to so many other literacies…
This post has sent me down a rabbit hole to see if I can find a mashup I made of an old 50s mall advertisement and dawn of the dead https://bavatuesdays.com/dawn-of-the-dead-take-3/ gonna have to dig in all my backups because it would be a nice complement to social media and all the mall zombies that everywhere want to eat our brains. Lost the videos when YouTube terminated my account because, surprise, surprise, I owned nothing
Lovely post Alan, I imagine I am walking past your porch on a quiet evening , maybe a lamp burning, listening to the chatter, noticing the work that has been going on around the house, and waving.
C’mon over, always room on the porch for you… or if you desire, I have a real barn to fix up the walls and interior!
Sippin’ coffee, reading
Kevin