Death of Blogging

[dotinthesky]

I've been thinking today if blogging and livejournaling is dead. Dead in the sense that most people who used them before have gone on to acquire many more social networks, and because of the increase in their personal admin (checking Facebook, checking Twitter, checking Instagram, etc) they no longer can tolerate long pieces of writing.

Twitter, to me, seems of the time. Tiny digestible nuggets that can lead you to longer articles if you so desire, but there's no pressure to read - you can easily just move/scroll on.  Before, with blogs and livejournals, there was the online social pressure to at least skim read.  Make some noise that you were paying attention. Now, they lie unread, uncommented, unnoticed. Or saved for "later" reading.

The age of people keeping blogs to document their lives as policemen / ambulance drivers / sex workers is also dead. Again, I think personal admin has got in the way and that type of cultural product is resigned to the noughties much like a lot of reality shows.

For myself, I sat in an old cemetery for lunch today and read some Walt Whitman.  I now know that Livejournal will never be the same, but I'm Ok with continuing to write here, for myself and for the few that still read this.  I've also started writing letters to friends who refuse to use social networks, and on Monday mornings I find a cafe before work and do a bit of fiction writing.

Comments

[rockingthemike.livejournal.com]

i tend to agree with all of this. unless you're blogging for someone else, or already an established blogger with an audience, long-form is essentially dead. however, that's not to say there's no future for it. i know of a couple people recently who have become so disenchanted with facebook and twitter that they're coming back here. does that mean they'll write more? maybe. will they write more focussed? possibly, but we won't know until the paradigm shifts just a little more.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I really really want to leave FB...