I am a short way into the book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, and the overview of zibaldoni (a particular kind of Renaissance-era Italian commonplace book) sparked this thought:
“Social media is a dead-end, public zibaldoni that we don’t preserve.”
So now I’m here, trying to unpack that thought.
When I write “social media” these days, it seems to refer to too many things in the world while simultaneously having no real meaning or significance as a term. Social media was, when I was young(er), a collection of three web services: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. People posted text, photos, and videos with idiosyncratic constraints1, and other people could make comments on those posts.
Of course that definition is subjective and incomplete but it is my memory. And if I imagine the sum of those services for an individual, it seems very similar to Roland Allen’s description of using a zibaldone:
“…although always idiosyncratic and personal to their owner, [zibaldoni] were not necessarily private, or intimate: you would share the highlights of your own with your friends, and if you saw something that you liked in theirs, you’d copy it over.” pg 64
A straight line from Early Modern cultural development to Postmodern media use. Is it a universal human quality to collect signifiers and reflect upon them later?
Of course there are differences, and that’s why I thought of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as “dead-end, public” ziboldoni. Social media was explicitly not private even when it was quite intimate. It was always aimed at your friends (or colleagues, or community, or strangers, or stalkers, etc.) and you created it with that audience in mind. And, sadly, it was nothing like a notebook that could survive over 500 years and become a research project for an international team with a seed budget of half a million dollars. It was likely to disappear, either purposefully (e.g. deleting all your social media to keep yourself sane and/or employable), accidentally (ever lost a password and access to an email account?), or by corporate action (mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcy, profligacy).2
I am completely off social media these days. I zapped my Facebook account, ditched my Twitter, closed my LiveJournal, and deleted my Instagram.3 In doing so, I lost much of my online ziboldone. I downloaded the archive of those accounts, and while the Instagram pics came through unscathed, everything else was stripped of the true experience. Links, comments, dialogues, captions — all gone. Some of you might be familiar with downloading these archives, and you are saying now “All that stuff is in there,” and that was not my experience, despite the names of the various folders. As with most parts of my life, I probably didn’t understand what I was doing and did it wrong.
- Do you remember when Facebook statuses all began with “Username is…”? I do, or I think I do, because sometimes 2006 Facebook seems like a hallucination. Twitter was 180 characters. And YouTube was all badly lit acoustic guitar performances. ↩︎
- Dead social media include MySpace, Friendster, Vine, Google Plus, and those are just the ones that I used. On top of that, Facebook is now Meta, Twitter is now X, and those name changes include dramatic changes in mission, values, user experience, and global respect. ↩︎
- I refused X, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and Tik-Tok (although that service does not fit my personal, out-dated definition of social media). I say “refused” because I felt the pull; I wanted to have the Internet-fast way of collecting, expressing, and connecting. ↩︎
