Blogs are the new vinyl

About a week ago marked the 12th anniversary of my first blog. Those were fun times, initially. I started the thing on a whim with no direction and it quickly evolved into a multi-purpose blog, primarily political but there was a decent amount of personal posts, some amusing things I would encounter, and general ranting.  However, it was always directed at an audience, however small.  Many virtual friends developed and everyone else had blogs as well.  It was an interesting community.

Then Facebook rolled into town and everyone got on board.  Immediately I saw the potential for blogs to die off.  There was so much more immediacy and everything seemed more accessible in one platform.  Between 2006 and 2008 I was blog posting on average twice per day.  This dropped by almost half in 2009 and by 2011 it was clear the direction was downhill.  In recent years the posts were primarily announcements of cat deaths and not much else.

Ironically it was during this time that Facebook was getting increasingly annoying for a number of reasons. People started writing less and sharing more in the form of memes and other things. Or perhaps it just seemed that way as the friend list grew from 30 people to 300. It is easier to share something amusing from someplace else and preface it with a few words, get 20 likes from people who were amused by it, maybe a few comments, feel reinforced by the experience and repeat a few hours (or a few minutes) later. I'm not knocking people for it. Everyone has to use the platform however it suits them best. It is simply a problem for me because that all started to look like a stream of garbage and not even in linear order!  The memes start to blend in with the adverts and soon it all looks too busy to be enjoyable. So much of it is repetitive as well.  You see the same meme on six different Facebook posts or fifteen different people are sharing and commenting on some absurd celebrity outburst or a politician’s faux pas.

For me it is far easier and preferable to visit the pages of individual people than deal with the flood of posts from everyone in a single news feed along with adverts. I only have 111 friends as I am writing this but that is more than enough to make the news feed absolutely maddening.

To make matters worse I was maintaining two separate Facebook pages.  I ceased all posting on one of them over a year ago thinking it would be more tolerable if I just focused on one of them, and then I ceased activity on that one about seven months ago.  It wasn’t something I decided to stop doing, or to stop for a specific amount of time. I simply stopped because I could not deal with it and the aversion has not subsided during the months I have been largely absent.  Twitter has filled the gap to some extent but that is still mostly noise without much substance.  In an effort to find a use for it I began following various people in Iceland who post in Icelandic to supplement my language study.  I get quite a thrill when I am able to read something in Icelandic without copying and pasting into a dictionary.  

Instagram has also been helpful for me in reducing social media clutter. I love that it is photo centric and most of the time artsy. But even mundane family photos are preferable to half a dozen shared memes on Facebook.

It finally occurred to me that I miss writing. And I miss writing in an environment where I have some aesthetic control, and without advertising.  Funny how this shit goes in a big circle.  One of the things I loved about having a blog, besides it being a forum for long rants, was that I had control over the presentation.  I probably spent as much time on my blog design as I did on writing for it. That helped make it mine and it was a blast to experiment with fonts and other design elements.  What has changed for me is that I’m not so interested in exerting that much energy and time into design elements.  I can keep it simple with a stock design and just tweak the colors and fonts, and yet it is still a reflection of my personal aesthetics.  But most importantly, it is a place to simply write.  Only this time I am not writing for an audience.  

I will likely write about things that hardly anyone will be interested in reading and are in fact nobody’s business if you want to get specific.  There will be nothing forced simply because it’s time for some fresh material on here. It is just going to flow when it feels like flowing. 

The temptation to post photos here will also be resisted. That is why I have Instagram although I may write about things in detail here related to photos I am posting on Instagram.  I feel a bit refreshed by the absence of pressure and clutter and the quaint notion that this blog may indeed be nothing but personal words on virtual paper.