So, why am I doing this? Rip it Up is such a rich resource, especially in the early years. Nothing else was really documenting pop culture, let alone the nascent alternative culture that was starting to boil up. The prevailing attitude in the mainstream media of the day seemed to be that pop music was kid’s stuff.
Archive
I’m here by way of atonement, because I used to be a real jerk about fandom, and I used to make fun of them, and think they were wasting their time. And then I had this kinda life-changing come-to-Jesus moment that I want to talk to you about and this really weird artifact that got produced partly because of me, and it’s completely changed my thinking. And as I’ve gotten to know fandom and really like them, I’ve come to believe that they kind of represent a future and a model for what communities are like on the Internet when you have actual people using machines to talk to one another rather than this kind of invented sense of what social life and social networks are supposed to be like, the way we’ve engineered them.
The Web We Lost
I can have my independent blog, but if it’s not being promoted through one of these networks, nobody sees it. If it’s not being injected in one of these streams in a format that’s consumable in one of these streams, that’s compatible with what they call native advertising, which is stream items that are ads, then it doesn’t get seen.