Marwick, A. E. (2026). Broken connections: Fieldnotes from the old internet. Social Media + Society, 12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261434796
Summary
In this reflective essay for Social Media + Society’s anniversary issue, Alice Marwick uses her own history as an early internet user—especially her years on LiveJournal in the early 2000s—to argue that something genuinely valuable has been lost in the shift to today’s platform-dominated web. She contrasts the intimacy, reciprocity, and community formation of legacy sites with the alienation, surveillance, and extractive logics of contemporary social media. Crucially, she frames the present state of platforms not as technological inevitability but as the contingent outcome of political-economic choices, and gestures toward alternative futures grounded in small-scale, care-oriented communication infrastructures.
Key Contributions
- A first-person historical account of LiveJournal and adjacent early-internet spaces (Prodigy, IRC, VAX/VMS bulletin boards) as a counterpoint to dominant social media histories.
- A normative critique of contemporary platform political economy grounded in lived experience rather than abstract theory.
- Reframes social media as social infrastructure requiring stewardship, safety, and care rather than a business optimized for scale and profit.
- Situates two decades of social media scholarship within the author’s own biography of internet use.
Methods
The essay is autobiographical and reflective, drawing on the author’s two-decade engagement with online communities. It combines a retrospective reading of her own archived LiveJournal entries and comment threads (preserved as a PDF) with narrative recollection of using Prodigy, IRC, bulletin boards, and LiveJournal across the 1990s and early 2000s.
Findings
- LiveJournal fostered sustained reciprocal writing, with lengthy posts generating dozens of substantive, supportive comments that constituted meaningful affective labor.
- Granular privacy and filtering features enabled semi-private, socially coherent spaces largely absent from today’s platforms.
- Relationships formed on LiveJournal produced lasting offline friendships, partnerships, and community ties persisting into middle age.
- Contemporary platforms (Meta, X, YouTube, Bluesky) leave the author feeling bored, surveilled, and unable to be honest, despite continued use of ephemeral channels like Instagram stories and Signal.
- Subcultural conditions—a relatively small, self-selected early user base—were part of what made these intimate dynamics possible.
- The trajectory toward consolidation, surveillance, and virality was not inevitable; alternative infrastructures should support small-scale, reciprocal sociality rather than replicate legacy platforms.
Connections
As an anniversary-issue reflection, this sits within a cluster of essays revisiting the promises and losses of social media’s history; it shares its infrastructural and care-oriented framing with Baym2026-tr and Swartz2026-zb, and its concern with alternatives to corporate platforms and platform decay resonates with Bruns2026-yv and Helmond2026-ll. Its emphasis on networked intimacy and community formation also connects to work on online publics such as Boyd2026-op.
Podcast
A research-radio episode discusses this paper: 🎧 MP3 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts