Giving the independent blog thing another try

In my relatively short life I’ve given many blogging formats a try. When I was 9, my mom set me up with a Cogeco based blogging site where I would write about… whatever it is nine year olds write about. Then came Facebook. I jumped on that in 2006 at 10 years old, sharing status updates and photos of hangouts with friends (and of course, many wonky “Photo Booth” effects with my baby brother). Then came Twitter. Instagram. TikTok. Now it’s the Metaverse. During my university years, I designed a free Wordpress site to blog and share upcoming concerts and projects. Now, as I take the first steps in my career as a musician and private teacher, it’s this website; which I wasn’t planning on using as a blog until very recently.

As a self-employed artist, it’s more important than ever for me to have an online presence. To share my performances past and present, to promote my private teaching business, and to reach out to fellow musicians & the broader community.

And then there’s the tech giants.

They make it possible to reach a massive audience, but with that, comes a price. The price is the personal information of users that they get to own. The price is being part of platforms that allow hate speech and bigotry to consume feeds. The price is the soon to be loss of Candian journalism, true fact-checked journalism, which is something that disturbs me deeply.

At this time, dissolving my Instagram and Facebook (aka Meta) accounts isn’t something I’m planning to do. As much as it conflicts me ethically, such a large number of my clients and performance opportunities are because of these very platforms. The visibility of these platforms is, I believe, integral to my freelance career. But I’m attempting to ween myself off, starting with this blog.

Yes, I’m working through Squarespace, a platform engineered and developed by yet another tech billionaire. But with this website, I’ve purchased a small domain of my own in this chaotic place that we call the internet. I can choose how I present my creative content. I can choose to link Canadian journalism if I would like to. I can choose not to allow hate speech. I feel just a little bit more free and a little bit more in control of my presence online.

So, all this to say, I’m giving the independent blog thing another try. I’ll still be linking my posts to the well known social media platforms, but I would like to move away from my reliance on the internet oligarchs who shall not be named.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading

Suzy