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

[steer.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure blogging is dead. I read more blogs than I ever did... and the blogs I read are more influential than they were. Maybe I am wrong.

I think the LJ model is dead because the majority of people prefer the quick gratification of posting something super short and getting a "like" or a "retweet". That has instant gratification. It's much easier to miss things on twitter or facebook so an important life event announced on those is likely to just go past. Twitter has more density of information... a lot of LJ entries are a few points and a lot of waffle. Twitter, or at least the people I follow, tend to be making a point or a joke or linking to something with every sentence. So it's easy to read LJ as "Blah blah blah" because the signal is so much less amongst the noise.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

*waves*

[norabird.livejournal.com]

Journaling is still the necessary thing to me.

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

I miss the heyday of LJ, especially now I'm so far away, but I'm not doing my bit to make it better really. I feel like I need to be "in the mood" to write a blog post, and that was easier when there really weren't any other choices. Now there's facebook and twitter which are much easier. I have annoyed myself in the past though by wasting an hour of time or more skimming facebook when I could have put that time (indeed, a lot less of it) into an LJ post. "I don't have time" for LJ doesn't cut it then!

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

I did wonder if I should have split my last post into 3 different entries to avoid tl;dr, but fuck it, I'm writing so that I remember stuff.

[sor-eye-ah.livejournal.com]

Am glad you're staying around x

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

It's quality not quantity that counts, I say. At least LJ doesn't have surveys clogging it up any more.

[arafel1.livejournal.com]

I am not sure if I agree with you. True, most of the people and friends I knew here are gone. But now the community seems to be more mature. There is much less drama or people with made-up identities. So, what if nobody reads your writing and nobody comments? At the end, most of the things we do pass unnoticed and have value only to ourselves.

[myendeavorca.livejournal.com]

It's just such an amazing time capsule...that's what forces me to blog on. Even when I'm bored of myself I write because I want to be able to re-read it again in 3-5-8 years...and see how far I've come or how I resolved issues or how I'd made goals and dreams realities....that's why. :) It won't die, and unlike paper it is just a bonus when someone comments. Or likes what you have to say! And I feel much virtually closer to my LJ friends than I have with MySpace or now fb. In fact those sites annoy me, but for some reason I haven't abandoned fb...yet!