Notes on the internet...

and how it has changed

When my beloved cat passed away a few weeks ago, I spent quite a lot of time looking through old photographs, blogs and Instagram posts to collate as many pictures as I could of him. It was a very healing process and brought back a lot of fun memories of our time together.

What I found really interesting about this was how much the internet, and what we put on it, has changed and how, for me at least, it is a much less personal and much more curated process than it was fifteen years ago.

I started writing online in 2005 on LiveJournal. For those of you too young to remember it was one of the first online diary platforms with the added benefit of you being able to lock down your posts for select groups of friends. It was more about the chat in the comments than any kind of miraculous insights or revelations in the original post. I don’t remember there being any insights or revelations on LiveJournal at all and I certainly don’t remember anyone ever telling anyone else how to live their lives - if we wanted to fix a vacuum cleaner there was YouTube and if we wanted to fix ourselves we sought professional help, not the assistance of an ‘influencer’ (a word that my spellcheck does not recognise). A big hello to everyone I’ve known since LiveJournal days!

This is the sort of top quality photographic material that my LiveJournal was littered with. I taught yoga for a living for many years until I had to retire for health related reasons, and here I am with no make up, greasy and sweaty from a day of teaching, and struggling to hold a large cat for reasons that are lost in the mists of time. I probably wouldn’t even post this sort of picture on my Instagram stories these days (although here I am posting on Substack….) as I wouldn’t think anyone would be interested, or want to see it, but more on my carefully curated Instagram life in a moment.

I moved from LiveJournal to Blogger and then to my own hosted (and now defunct) Wordpress blog called ‘Suburban Yogini’ which I ran for many years. Yoga bloggers were a big thing back in the late noughties (we never reached the heady heights of the food bloggers who blogged their meals three times a day but still, we tried…) and the above photo is an article I wrote for Yoga and Health Magazine back in 2009 about yoga bloggers across the world. I loved writing that blog and the community that grew up around it and I was sad to let it go in 2016 when my life changed dramatically and I had no real use for it anymore (blogs had become ‘not a thing’ by then too to be honest). I kind of wish I’d archived it rather than deleting it, although I do at least have all the photos including this header which was designed for me by another yoga blogger called Bree.

(Sometimes I think about the world of difference between our various yoga blogs of fifteen years ago (particularly see the below pictures in front of the washing machine) with the perfect pictures of yoga teacher on Instagram now - there is a a lot to say there, but it is not for this post).

I started my Instagram account in 2014 predominantly for somewhere to store the millions of pictures I took (I didn’t back up my pictures then so please enjoy the below 2014-era Instagram filter of my cat!). I was still running my yoga studio then and I never used Insta to advertise it (much as I’m terrible at marketing my books) but one thing I have noticed is how different my content is these days.

Admittedly, filters have come a long way since 2014 (thank you VSCO and Snapseed) and Stories means that I never post on the grid multiple times a day anymore, but oh my do I take myself seriously online these days! I have a very specific order in which I post pictures so that the grid looks a certain way, I try not to post too often (I seem to get more views that way although heaven alone knows how the algorithm works), and I use a very specific filter. If a photo doesn’t fit with the aesthetic I’m trying to create it doesn’t go on there.

When I think about this it makes me sad. Firstly, it meant I only posted one picture on my grid of my cat in the whole of the last year of my life. If you had told 2008 Rachel that she would have laughed in your face - she posted almost daily cat content on LiveJournal. Secondly, it has come about since I got published. For someone who has spent so much of her life on the internet, I am essentially a very private person and getting published, while a dream come true, made me feel very public on the internet. I hadn’t realised, when I wrote my first book, how much personal marketing authors are meant to do and it is very obvious to me how the amount I do has become less and less as I become more and more uncomfortable online. AI and deep faking has not helped my general discomfort and I hate doing videos or lives for my publisher. I don't use tiktok (for so many reasons!) or make reels. I forget to post on my author FB page. I steer clear of The Artist Previously Known as Twitter. I haven’t used my real name online for years.

This probably says a lot more about me than about the internet. I am in no way comfortable being ‘seen’. I'm bored of being shouted at by strangers or being told by rands what would make my books better. I contemplate daily on locking down all my online accounts.

And yet here I am writing on the internet still. It’s like a compulsion.

Thank you for reading to my rambling and I have no conclusions to reach at all….other than thinking about how much I miss the old unfiltered internet and the nonsense we chatted about back then.

But I’m interested to know about you. How long have you been online? What do miss most about the old days of the internet?