Here comes a wander. Be warned.
There are some bulbs along our driveway that were here when we bought our house in 1984. In the Spring, they put up a bunch of large green, strappy leaves which dry and fade away as the Summer heat comes on. Then, come Autumn, large pink crocus-like flowers emerge. The surprise was delightful the first time and still is, 30-some years later. (Turns out they are probably Giant Colchicum – Autumn Crocus).
So blogging… I’m not sure if it is because I’m paying attention differently, or if there is something emerging around personal blogging like the crocus. It is alive all year long. It sends up shoots in the Spring then disappears again, and then it flowers. Is a new cycle starting? People whose blogs I used to read consistently but who have faded out over the years are blogging again. There is crosslinking around the topic at hand. Look who is blogging again!! I’m so delighted. (AND: I need a better feedreader, email subscriptions are not as useful, help!)
Blogging is different than participating in social media for me. But it takes more time and attention. It is quieter for the most part. Sometimes solitary. Sometimes it connects. Sometimes it needs the permanency of a url so it can sit, and later, even much later, the flowers can emerge. It is NOT feed of the moment for me.
I wrote yesterday about my Blogiversary. One of the observations was the power of thinking out loud in a blog post and the tantalizing possibility that others may chime in, counter, improve or simply show they were “there” in a comment. As Chris Corrigan noted, the satisfaction is NOT like the (addictive, distracting, destructive) “likes” or “retweets” of FB, Instagram and Twitter. I feel something visceral in this. Cellular versus a visual stimulation that comes and goes in an instant.
Dave Pollard wonders out loud about the role of relationship in our blogging. About how relationships do or do not inform our sense of identity. Euan Semple riffs on the relationship and self knowing. ( I find Euan’s post today on non-identifying usefully troublesome and need to think about what is surfacing for me, about the down side of non-identifying when one is from a dominant culture, race, gender etc. Claiming non-identification can also be an abdication of the negative impact of privilege but that is another topic for pondering.)
What we all have in common is that we wonder out loud in our blogs.
P.S. If you don’t blog, and are INTERESTED, check out these suggestions from Chris.
I’ve seen lots of folks on twitter saying, “well, now Elon owns this thing, what can we get Dolly Parton to build for us?” and it makes me wonder how easily we have given up our agency to billionaires. Are we really waiting for the rich person whose politics we most admire to come around and save us? Ten years ago it was all about the 99%. We should be taxing these people into the ground, not asking them to buy a network for us.
So I have seen lots of folks talking about new social media networks, but only a few of us talking about making it ourselves. Because somehow blogging got co-opeted by corporate communications and monetization schemes and so the pressure to *perform* blogging is more powerful than ever. We can wear our casual clothes on Facebook or Twitter, but somehow we’ve ben convinced that unless you have a $2000 suit, you should show up to blog that way.
I think it behooves those of us that remember the original social networks to encourage people to do what we are doing. Just write, and share and engage. Don;t serve ads, don;t check stats, don’t do it for the money. Do it because in thinking and learning out loud you make the world better.
100%!
I’m hopeful that some of the thought leaders and people for whom either Twitter’s character limitations (yes, I know about threads but…) or the pressure of substack are not quite right pick the habit back up. Blogging feels almost Goldilocks-esque in many ways. It also feels as though the end of Google Reader did in many blogs, to which I say Feedbin!
Interesting point about choosing to non-identify being a luxury. I don’t disagree but I’ve always been drawn to people who resist labels, even their own, and thanks to my past many of those have had no access to luxury of any sort.
There does seem to be a bit more momentum w.r.t to blogging. People from back when we started that write more again. But also many newcomers. Five years ago I emptied my feedreader, as so many of the blogs I followed had fallen silent. By now I follow over four hundred again, and most of them are new(ish) bloggers. I recently started following a weblog written by a 15yr old, that I found because I was receiving pingbacks from their blog to mine. New conversations and meet-ups result from it: I’ve been in video calls with various small groups of the bloggers that now make up my feeds.
How would you like to co-create a simple online event to remind us all how to find and subscribe to and manage reading blogs again? You, Alan Levine, who else?
Welcome back, Kotter 🙂 Send chocolate please 🙂
YES!
🙂 i was just kidding about the chocolate but love to hang outside for a coffee if you are ever in Vancouver for a conference or what not (inside if COVID is over which i figure will truly be in 2023)