This post marks the ten year anniversary of this blog.
When I started, in 2006, blogging was already past its peak, and social media was beginning to make inroads into society. As you can tell from the drastic fall-off in posting on this blog, it began to make inroads into my life as well.
I spend far longer each day on Facebook than is strictly healthy, and it gains me very little. I assume its addictiveness is carefully engineered into it. In terms of personal writing, it's worse than useless as each post there appears (or may not appear) on a friend's wall for a few minutes or hours, and then pretty much disappears. You have to take special measures to find a post you once liked. If you forget about it for an hour, it's buried under an avalanche of newness, many of which are memes, shares, and photographs of text. (The latter is a way to get around the lack of fonts, colors, italics, bold and strikethrough on Facebook; simply write it in Word, take a screenshot and post it as a picture.)
Facebook postings benefit Mr. Zuckerberg (and the missus and Little Zuckerberg) by providing content that keeps people coming back and reading ads and sponsored posts between the updates. The benefit to the individual is small, but obviously must be of some net positivity or we wouldn't keep doing it. Blogspot and Wordpress missed the boat on that one - here we write what we like and it doesn't make a cent for the website owner. The downside being that, unless you are one of the blogosphere's superstars, no-one reads it, either. This blog has sixteen followers, most of whom probably haven't checked their RSS Feeds (their what?) in five years. Quite a few people get here through a Google search for an interesting topic, but, as I have done thousands of times in the past myself, they read that article and move on, and have no intention of following or checking back in later. (Nor should they.)
But this is plainly the place to continue to write long-form essays and articles that stay visible, and searchable on the internet. More to come in the next ten years.
2 comments:
Exactly my own conundrum lately, as well. I feel lately that if I'm going to write and not get feedback, I may as well just pull out a pen and a notebook. That's the appeal of social media-- Your words can be part of a dialogue, not just a monologue. At least briefly, until your post is buried under an avalanche of memes.
*hits Like*
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