Hi donkey frens! If you've followed this blog for any length of time, or any of my older blogs, you know I am prone to thinking I can feel various "vibes." This vibe-catching leads me to believe personal blogging as we know it may be in a decline.
I do not have a Facebook account and don't intend to get one. I was using Twitter, and then began to feel uncomfortable with how much time and attention it was taking. This led me to re-examine how I feel about the whole online experience: Is it just (1) frivolous and ultimately empty, (2) a true way to connect, or (3) something in the middle?
Humans are not known for moderation. I think online lives ping-pong back and forth between choices 1 and 2, above. Choice 3 tends to be left out, in part because of the very nature of online interaction. You snooze, you lose. You miss a post, or stop tweeting for a few days, or don't update your status or stop replying on forum threads, and you are quite quickly forgotten.
I am not faulting this behavior: it's a lot like having a neighbor you get along with, but they move...or a roommate who moves...or frens up at your summer vacation area who stop coming to their cabin in the summer...when the commonality is removed, the relationship is discontinued. It cannot stand without the structure that was an intrinsic part of it. It's a "shipboard" friendship. That's neither good nor bad; it just is.
So it may be with the online world and the blogging world. If someone in effect "moves away" by dropping out of view, it guts the connection. It's not like you can just walk next door and see how your neighbor is doing, or give a quick call on the cell, or know that you will run into them at the grocery store at the summer place. They are simply gone from your sphere. And if they return, the feeling of community, of friendship, must be rebuilt. If they repeatedly appear and disappear, self-interest might dictate that it's not all that safe to try to maintain a link with them.
Blogging takes considerable devotion. Some people are happy with using what I regard as shortcuts to a feeling of community -- participating in this or that "theme" or "meme" or other structured posting schedule about a particular subject. But that builds numbers, not community. If someone runs out of vintage redos or new dishes or the like, they don't participate, and they won't be a part of the group any longer, either.
But that might not be as negative as it seems. If someone is looking for a very light way to interact, it would not be upsetting to "drop out" of a loosely knit community. But some folks out in the bloggie world are quite lonely and quite isolated in life, and I do worry about them. People aren't known for altruism. If someone can't "keep up" by offering what others want, they get left behind, many times. They offer up their lil' crumb of interaction, and it isn't even noticed. Sometimes it's even sneered at. Not too many angels in the bloggie world, just as there aren't in the real world. When we happen across one, we are grateful.
My point, long in coming, is that it's easier to feel you are part of a community through these newer means of interaction -- Twitter, Facebook -- than to do so through the blog world. I don't think it's any truer a connection, or less of a connection. It's an easier connection, and people tend to like easy. I think we will see fewer and fewer "personal" blogs -- blogs meant to just be like a coffee klatch sort of thing.
The bar has been set higher and higher and higher in terms of immediacy, too, and blogs lag on that. A post a day isn't immediate enough. It's rush, rush, rush, this is NOW, five seconds ago is passe. The beast must be fed, constantly! Just as people are uninterested in reading news that happened even 3 days ago, they are uninterested in the flotsam and jetsom of previous posts. Some blogs have valuable archives; most don't. It's not their nature. Websites tend to be more "storage" areas for valuable content.
Enter Twitter. One way around it is to put Twitter on yer bloggie, or have a Tumblr blog, which is basically yer Twitter feed in a nice form. But then yer back at the beginning of the puzzle again: Too much time and effort on something ultimately ephemeral?
So here's a Big Hilda - by artist Duane Bryers - fer a cheerful end to an overly long post. Dig her flour sack 2-piece -- I'd pay good money fer one, only I'm not sure flour came in the size of sack I'd need:
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