Jason Kottke, author of kottke.org and one of my inspiration in the late 00’s, has announced his own medium dead as of this year.

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.

Maybe so. And yes, the readability of personal content has plummeted in recent years, but I’m not quite willing to just cave on this just yet. Social is great – incredible even.

But it’s not yours, it’s theirs.

Facebook owns your content, your photos, your ideas. If I’m going to create something of substance, pour my soul into the a written piece, put my work out there for the world to see, why in the fuck would I give it away to another platform? Moreover (and maybe this is just my designer past talking) why would I give up control of the flanking content? Do I really want your selfie from the bar sitting next to something I’ve spent I semester toiling over ? Maybe it makes me a snob, but not really.

Narcissism is a powerful force and the broad swath of audience available on the social tubes is immense and still not fully tapped in terms of monetization. But the power of control, the ability to govern your own content AND the property, the canvas, on which it sits – to me that loss is profound.