Broken Connections: Fieldnotes from the Old Internet

Abstract

This essay reflects on the lived experience of early internet culture to interrogate what has been lost in the transition to today’s platform-dominated online environment. Drawing on autobiographical fieldnotes from the 1990s and early 2000s—Prodigy forums, IRC channels, university bulletin boards, and most centrally LiveJournal—I revisit a period when online communication fostered intimacy, community, and meaningful social ties among strangers and friends alike. LiveJournal, in particular, offered an infrastructure for sustained reciprocal writing, affective labor, and audience management that enabled deep connection and mutual support. Its social dynamics illuminate a mode of computer-mediated communication that was less commercialized, less surveilled, and more oriented toward collective meaning-making than contemporary social media. By contrast, today’s social platforms feel alienating, extractive, and hostile to vulnerability. The political economy of social media, driven by advertising, surveillance, consolidation, and algorithmic optimization, has foreclosed the kinds of small, semi-private, socially coherent spaces that once enabled genuine community formation. Rather than imagining social media as infrastructure requiring stewardship, safety, and care, the industry has prioritized virality, scale, and profit, producing environments shaped by harassment, polarization, and corporate capture. Reflecting on these shifts, the essay argues that the trajectory of social media was never inevitable. Alternative design choices and governance models might have cultivated a richer, more humane digital public sphere. If online community has a future, it will not lie in replicating legacy platforms, but in reimagining communication infrastructures that support vulnerability, reciprocity, and small-scale sociality, the qualities that once made the early internet feel like home.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a social scientist who’s studied social media for more than 20 years. After fielding the obligatory questions about today’s platform panic—TikTok, X, social media bans, whatever—I slip into a well-worn schtick: “I started out looking at MySpace and Friendster, and now it’s Telegram and TikTok, but the basic dynamics remain the same!” And to a certain extent, that’s true. The obsessions that guided my early work, like online self-presentation, impression management, microcelebrity, and self-branding, are still relevant, although I couldn’t have predicted the scope and scale of industrial influencer culture that followed.

But to another extent, it isn’t true at all because my fascination with internet communication and community far pre-dates “social media” or “social platforms.” In high school, I logged into Prodigy, a subscription-based computer network that functioned as a kind of proto-internet for home users, every day. I met other teenagers on alternative music forums, trading bootleg tapes and sharing concert reviews, but also connected with a group of people in my high school I wouldn’t have otherwise met, creating a shadow social circle that paralleled my own. In college, I spent hours chain-smoking and chatting on IRC channels. I remember how pleased I was when my favorite channel’s bots began granting me operator status whenever I joined, a mark of insider status. Later in college, I met my closest friends through the school’s internal VAX/VMS bulletin board; we now have a Signal chat where we talk almost every day. But mostly, when I think about online communication and what it can be, I think about LiveJournal.

LiveJournal is mostly forgotten, now; even at its peak, it was best known for hosting Harry Potter fan fiction and the journals of thousands of angsty teenagers. But in 2002, when I started using it, I was 24, living in a hipster neighborhood in Seattle, eking out a living doing contract work at tech companies, and drinking too much. I began writing diary entries almost every day to an imagined and mostly unseen audience, talking endlessly about indie music, clothes, my frustrating romantic life, my friends, and my mostly-terrible jobs at the bottom of the dot-com economy. To put into context how different it was back then, my journal was completely public—anyone who knew the URL could read it—and “alicetiara” was enough of a pseudonym that I felt safe sharing even very personal things. I rarely posted pictures.

Gradually, I met lots of other people through LiveJournal. Many were Seattleites—LJ was created by Brad Fitzpatrick during his graduate work at the University of Washington—but others were in New York or LA or Portland or Boston, a network of disaffected 20 something internet people, mostly women. Eventually, most of my “real-life” friends got LiveJournals, and I’d go out drinking with them and then come home and write about it, and everyone would comment, and then they’d write about it on their LJs, and then I’d comment on those entries. I spent hours at my crappy webmonkey jobs reading and commenting and writing.

During the heyday of LJ, I might post an 800-word essay about my day and come back to 45 comments, some paragraphs long. Reading through my journal now (I have a PDF), the comments are incredibly generous—detailed feedback on grad application essays, pep talks after breakups, heartfelt support with drinking and drugs and bad sexual experiences. Of course, LJ had privacy features, and I eventually made my entire journal friends-only. You could create filters with ever-tinier groups of people on them, a feature that most social media sites still don’t have. And all this filtering and journaling of course caused drama; you could often figure out when someone posted an entry that didn’t include you. Sidebar: “LJ drama” was frequent, especially in fandom communities; the Encyclopedia Dramatica, a snarky wiki of LJ feuds, memes, and “celebrities,” was founded in 2004 to document it and was foundational to 4chan’s early years (Peeters et al., 2021).

For 8 years, I posted multiple times a week, and then a few times a month, and then once a month, and then it drifted off; LJ got sold to a shady Russian company that used it to crack down on political dissidents, my LiveJournal friends mostly moved to Facebook and Instagram and group chats and Substack, and LJ became part of my past rather than my present. We are all now firmly in middle-age. People are married and divorced, with or without children and pets, tenured professors and best-selling authors, stay-at-home parents and tech workers and office drones. And I still stay in touch with many of them because for years on end, we read about each other’s lives every day. We met in person. We became lifelong friends. We dated. We shared our 20s. I met my husband on LiveJournal; he had a crush on me from my fabulous-DJ-nightlife online persona and recently confessed that when he finally met me, he was slightly disappointed that I was not mysterious and slinky in real life. I explained that mysterious and slinky girls do not post thousands of words about their inner feelings on the internet every day.

LiveJournal was proof, to me, that the internet can bring people together and create real community, and that it can enhance in-person relationships. LJ enabled people behind the screen to pour out their hearts and share their feelings, whether they were good writers or not. As my husband puts it, LJ was peak internet, yet its heyday was 20 years ago.

Today, I am simultaneously bored and disgusted by social media. I am uninterested in supporting Meta, a company actively supporting fascism and bigotry who won’t even remove scam advertisements because they make them so much money. While I found a home on academic Twitter for many years, X is now a far-right meme machine populated, as far as I can tell, by men I wouldn’t like at all if I met them in person. I am uninterested in sites that collect my personal information and sell them to data brokers or, worse, to Palantir and DOGE and ICE. I hate being directed to a YouTube video when I could be reading a short article. I am bad at video and self-conscious about how I look on screen. So, I stick to silly Instagram stories for a small group of people, including some of my LJ friends, which provide enough ambient awareness that I know what people are up to but disappear in a day. ¹ I read Reddit, just as I used to read Usenet and bulletin boards and advice columns. But there is nowhere online where I can be honest about my life. I’m afraid of trolls and the far-right and mean gossips and looking unprofessional. I rarely meet new people online; instead, I “follow” people, but only see the glossy version of them. I have real-life friends, of course, and wonderful group chats, and friends I talk to on Signal and WhatsApp and iMessage; but that sense of living life within an online community is long-gone.

None of this was inevitable. Technology could always have been otherwise, and that is equally true for social media. Obviously, LJ and its ilk wouldn’t work today. Part of what made early internet communication so exciting was that it was somewhat subcultural. Only half of the US and 10% of the world population were online at all in 2002, and most of them were not, shall we say, as enthusiastic as I was. But if we had thought of internet communication not as a business but a social infrastructure, we could have invested in user protection, moderation, and safety instead of ad-tech, personalization, and large language models. Rather than a political economy of social media that enables concentration, oligarchy, technofascism, mass surveillance, and networked harassment, we might have a vast ecosystem of small sites that made the good parts of early computer-mediated communication even better.

If social media has a future—and, to be clear, I’m not convinced that it does—it will not be a few mega-platforms with billions of users. It will not be a series of independent sites that mimic the functionality of the big winners; Bluesky works just like old Twitter but completely lacks the humor and joy of its predecessor. Perhaps too many things have changed for a site like LJ to ever exist again. It’s expensive to run a site and easy to burn yourself out. But I still believe in the promise and possibility of online communication; that is what keeps me going, and perhaps foolishly, I hope that I’ll experience it again.