A Couple Thoughts on Blogging

First, Elizabeth Spiers on her own blog, in Requiem for Early Blogging:

The growth of social media in particular has wiped out a particular kind of blogging that I sometimes miss: a text-based dialogue between bloggers that required more thought and care than dashing off 180 or 240 characters and calling it a day. In order to participate in the dialogue, you had to invest some effort in what media professionals now call “building an audience” and you couldn’t do that simply by shitposting or responding in facile ways to real arguments.

If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.

This is what I strive to do here, because I see the beauty in it. Not all my friends blog, nor do I realistically expect them to. But I have gotten some face-to-face conversations about some of my posts. Truth be told, I don’t meet face-to-face with my friends as much as I’d like, so this is often how I get to have the conversations that are on my mind.

I’ve also had blog responses and even some email conversations, and I much prefer any of these routes over quick burst responses that happen on today’s social media platforms. There are no constraints with these other avenues outside of our own minds, and there’s little influence outside of what we already know since there’s no wall of noise constantly persisting.

Then there’s Pete Brown, on his blog Exploding Comma, with This is not a post on the Internet.:

Having said all that, I remain unconvinced that I am any better off having posted all of the stuff in all of those places over the last thirty years than had I just written it down on paper. I know that, for some people, writing on the internet has been a way to find a community that they would not otherwise have had. I’m sure that is true.

On the whole, though, I do not think we have been well served by having a place to broadcast our thoughts and feelings for the entire world to see. Maybe it was better when sites were small and there were not algorithms designed to boost the worst, most toxic sorts of rhetoric and interaction, but I am not even sure that is the case.

This does raise an important question of how much of our lives we want to make public on the internet, whether that be on blogs like this one or on our social media accounts. It’s to the point I’m considering using the membership model here, which I can make invite-only, to limit the visibility of my more personal posts. Frankly, some things I’m happy only letting a very select few see. I know of a few others who have also taken this route, adding a little friction to get to the content.

The beauty of Ghost is with some slight edits of code (the documentation looks really good for this), I can have those members-only posts disappear from view. That said, I’m still probably reaching out to the person who created my theme for help with this.

Both of these posts illustrate how we can dig a little deeper within ourselves for dialog. I’m also displaying how we can respond to one another without going about it in some bullshit manner. These are big reasons why this site wins with me.