outta mind outta site

Ye Olde Blogging and Why It Disappeared: Part IV

As I wrote earlier, now it's 2016, and "nobody blogs anymore." I was interested in exploring why this happened, and why it's so hard to get this world of personal blogs back on the internet. So I (via email) asked four friends who made up the core of my blogging group in the mid-2000s to share their thoughts with me on the topic: What happened to personal blogging as we knew it, and why did it happen?

Tom's thoughts are here, and Matt Yglesias's are here, and Susan's are here. Last but not least, Kriston.

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I'll bet what all of us miss is the smallness of the blogosphere. It was once possible to read everything in your blogroll. (Or, in the late days of the High Blogosphere, your RSS reader.) Mine was always aspirational: I'd read all of y'all's stuff, plus, you know, The Poor Man, Eschaton, Calpundit, Tapped, Pandagon, then maybe half of a really long Crooked Timber post on Hegel or something, see what Volokh had to say, sneer at something on Tacitus. I tried to read everything I could with what time I wasn't fisking something really, really important.

 

But the crucial thing was that it was possible to read or at least know about everything happening. And that made it exciting! I'm not the first person to observe that the early blogosphere was a bit like post-college college; I learned things about political science and economics that I never bothered to study in college, at least enough to seek out more information about specific topics. It was also like post-college college in that it felt socially like a closed loop, like a dorm. The blogroll was never as much a library device as it was a banner, a House Shield.

 

I would say that social media has suffered in the same way that blogging did. It eventually grows so large and non-local that it becomes difficult to keep up with it. I think Facebook was probably fun at one point (wasn't it? Surely it had to've been) and I definitely remember Friendster and MySpace being fun and important things at the start. But all these and even Twitter went the way of the media: they became global, not local, with rules and expectations set by everyone, not just us.  

 

Now that it's no longer small I would find it hard to write something jut for fun. It's partly because I'm old and don't have any kind of fun that really needs to be shared all that badly, and partly because I enjoy writing about fun topics like exclusionary zoning or installation art. Maybe some part of me occasionally thinks about sharing feelings about family or sadness or dreams, and like a responsible adult I suppress those instincts! So I don't know what for myself a return to blogging would look like, other than of course the excellent blogging we are serving up at TheAtlantic.com. I think there isn't any other return to blogging because the borderlessness that made it great personally and the boundaries that made it right socially are gone.

 

What I don't get anymore is where the blogging instinct went, or what people are channeling that feeling into now. I don't buy that Vine represents exactly the same energy although I will buy that it's immensely creative (based on the Vine that I have seen). Mittens will know better than me what young writers are doing with their time, but it isn't starting blogs just hoping to get noticed. 

 

We did so much sharing through text. Is that over? Millennials don't want to do that anymore? I guess we have little choice to conclude that ours is the greatest generation and it was blogging that made us strong.

Ye Olde Blogging and Why it Disappeared: Part III

As I wrote earlier, now it's 2016, and "nobody blogs anymore." I was interested in exploring why this happened, and why it's so hard to get this world of personal blogs back on the internet. So I (via email) asked four friends who made up the core of my blogging group in the mid-2000s to share their thoughts with me on the topic: What happened to personal blogging as we knew it, and why did it happen?

Tom's thoughts are here, and Matt Yglesias's are here. Now up, my dear friend Susan, who I would not have met without the blogs of 2004. You really should dig through her archives. She's such a talented writer. 

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Now you've made me go back and think about why I started blogging in the first place. I had a boring job sitting in a dark corner of a law firm where it made no difference if I worked 2 hours or 10. I was reading Elizabeth Spiers' pre-gawker blog Begging to Differ and discovering this hilarious register of communication called snark. I had just moved to DC and had no friends and Kriston was still in Texas. I was bored. And nobody was listening. So why not. I could try on a persona, hear what I sounded like, amuse myself and one or two others, risk free. Very soon it became about the community of bloggers and the space we met online and offline - a primitive scratching of the itch that other forms of social media have now optimized and monetized. Same basic formula as today: voice and community.  Looking back dispassionately: it was a (relatively) time-consuming way to express ourselves on the internet and connect to other humans. You had to work out your page design. You had to choose a comment-management service. You had to curate and update blog rolls. You had to learn basic html! No platform would ask that of its casual users today! 

 

Like T Lee says, on a personal level, none of the blog-friendly factors are there now. We don't have boring jobs anymore, we've (tragically!) discovered our own banality, and if the payoff to sitting down and tapping out 2,000 words on my Wesley Clark crush was the pleasure that came from continuing an inside joke, the satisfaction of comments from friends on my blogroll, an approving link from another blogger -- well, now I can get that same payoff a lot quicker if I want. 

 

But, you know, I used to blog a lot. And I don't tweet a lot. OK, yes, a good part of that is the price of a throwaway remark is too damn high. (Remember getting "Dooced" as a fringe, tail risk injustice?)  But also I'm just no good in 140 characters. It's not my form. I'm okay with that. I am happy twitter is there and I can have a peek into the lives of all of you and follow my super niche regional interests. (Ask me about Moldovan financial sector corruption!) All the social media platforms you are abandoning this month have our basic interaction and community needs amply covered.    

 

But the voice side -- well, not for me. I miss writing things like a human and not a corporate-bot. (Ask me about stakeholder engagement and capacity building!)  Blogging was public enough that I had to put some effort into what I wrote, but not so public that it was paralyzing. At its best, it was satisfying in a way that finally achieving a properly witty tweet will never be for me.  I don't have the discipline to sit and write for no audience whatsoever, and so I don't write at all. And I miss your voices, you guys! I would like to blog again, in order to write just a little bit again.  But gonna go deep here - the other thing I suspect we might miss about blogging: Twenty-something Us. Isn't blogging nostalgia quite a bit like college best-years-of-our-lives nostalgia? We had all the time, we were blithely ignorant of our ignorance, everything we thought was interesting, our friends were brilliant (still are!), everything was new, worthy of note, our motives were Pure! People do still write like that all over the internet, those people just aren't us. DO WE MISS BLOGGING OR DO WE MISS OURSELVES???? 

To answer your question about the return of blogging. Do not forget that in 30 years we will return to our prior state. We will have time. We won't give a shit what anyone thinks. We will think we know it all. We are going to have some awesome group geezer blogs, y'all.      

Ye Olde Blogging and Why it Disappeared: Part II

As I wrote earlier, now it's 2016, and "nobody blogs anymore." I was interested in exploring why this happened, and why it's so hard to get this world of personal blogs back on the internet. So I (via email) asked four friends who made up the core of my blogging group in the mid-2000s to share their thoughts with me on the topic: What happened to personal blogging as we knew it, and why did it happen?

Tom's thoughts are here, and next up? Matt Yglesias (one of the many people I met through blogging in the mid-2000s and became IRL friends with).

Matt's thoughts on the disappearance of personal blogging:

Old-time blogging was, essentially, what we would nowadays call "social media" and it died basically because it was beaten by Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and so on. 

The time and energy that once upon a time people would have put into a blog is now put into social networks that are simplified, easy to use, and more popular than blogging ever was. At the same time, blogging has "upscaled" into professional, monetized media companies.

 

I don't think blogging per se will ever come back, but I do think that Twitter's timeline is basically the closest thing to blogs that we have today and it's at least conceivable that the company's leadership will build the product tools that would make it possible to use Twitter to blog. Instead of "tweetstorming," for example, maybe you could attach a post to a Tweet the way you attach a photo? Contra Tom, I do think a lot of the rambling, risk-taking, discursive nature of blogging lives on — it's just up on twitter. 

 

Something that I think is interesting here is the counterfactual. In the heyday of blogging, Alphabet (née Google) owned both Blogger and Google Reader but didn't focus on developing either of them as businesses or really as products. This was also the period during which Google tried (and failed) to launch Orkut, Buzz, Wave, and Plus all to no avail. What if Google had made ongoing development of Reader/Blogger the pillar of the social strategy rather than trying to launch brand new social products? Is it possible then that Facebook's remorseless march to become King of All Web Content could have been halted? Would a more RSS-centric traffic universe have saved the blogs? 

 

Who knows. One tension is that Google's core product was and remains web search, and something Google realized early on was that to make the web search experience work the way users wanted it to work random blogs had to be heavily downweighted relative to more "credible" content. So given the centrality of search to Google's identity and business model, it would have been challenging for Google to promote a form of content that Google's own standards rate as low quality. 

Quitting the Internet (Except for Here)

UPDATE: If you need to get in touch with me, email cathdandrews at gmail dot com. Also, consider signing up for this newsletter, which I will continue to update.

LOL, Typepad has a tag of "Weblogs," which I just used to categorize this post. Hi 2004.

Anyways. It's been about two months since I've posted here. When you look back on the past couple of years, that's actually a relatively short amount of time compared to my normal pattern of posting, which was hitting, like, three to four times a year. Many of those blog posts were me lamenting that I never blogged anymore. The things that took the blame? Social media. I tweeted, Facebooked, and Instagram'd every single goddamn thought I had at every single minute, and that made it impossible to think of things to blog, and oh well, that was that, this is how we live now! And my little lizard brain continued into a descent of complete lack of ability to string together three thoughts at a time.

I'm here hoping to change that.

Starting on Monday, November 16th, I'm signing off from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for just shy of two months - until my birthday in January of 2016 (Jesus maybe I should go further, that's a sad birthday present to come back to. Anyways). The reason? These platforms that have so enticed me over the past few years have, in the past year or so, started to really take an emotional, mental, and I'd even say physical toll on me.

Probably my case is extreme generally because of my personality and who I am. I love media. I love consuming media. I love creating media. I was born with a very short attention span. Over the past 35 years, that attention span has shrunk to the length of approximately five seconds. And in the past two years, I would say it’s basically totally taken off and been all ‘bye felicia’ and I’m like what’d you say I didn’t even hear you because I was too busy scrolling on Twitter.

A lot of people seem to be able to utilize social media and our 24/7 ability to access the internet via these nifty pocket computer things just fine, with no effect on their lives. In fact, I expect most people can have a lovely and productive relationship with their phones and the internet and have very full lives outside of those things.

I am not one of those people. I have an extremely addictive personality (seriously, to the point where I have legit never tried drugs because I know I would like them too much and basically end up in a halfway house). I have a need for external validation. I seem, horrifyingly, to not be able to have a thought, feel an experience, or see some pretty scenery without needing to share it with the internet. And I really, really want it to stop.

Let me paint you a picture of why I'm taking these steps by taking you through a typical day with Catherine and her internet:

-5:45am (ok, this wake-up time existed only in my marathon training days, which are now over, but let's pretend I'm still a better person who wakes up earlier than you): Groggily wake up to my iPhone alarm. Immediately roll over and spend at least 15 minutes scrolling through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
-6:15am: Get out the door and run. Check my Garmin watch with pace and time every 15 seconds. Listen to Spotify music on phone. Check every app I can on my phone at stoplights.
-7:50am: Walk to work. Check phone like 20 times. (Note: It takes 35 minutes to walk to work.)
-8:45-5pm: Work (at my exceedingly excellent job that I love a lot but that takes place nearly entirely at a computer). Check Facebook and Twitter probably, no joke, like 50 times a day. To the point where when I need a mental break from work, I open a new tab without even thinking and the first options that pop up are Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Instagram.com
-5-10pm. Walk somewhere, check my phone 20 times. Wait for somebody at a bar while staring at my phone. Maybe manage to have a conversation of a 5-minute length without checking my phone. 
-10pm: Fall asleep cuddled up in bed to my iPhone, taking in that sweet, sweet screen glow, going through an endless cycle of, oooh, new tweets! Oooh, new Facebook likes! Oooh, I got a new comment on my Instagram shot! Should clear that one email out of my inbox...Ooh, new tweets!

You see the issue. 

Not only is it just wearing, I was starting to consider the emotional ramifications of so much instant access as serious. I compared myself to everybody. I could search a new date's ex-girlfriends and think, 'Well crap, they're prettier and more accomplished than I am.' I would get extreme amounts of work done because I became hyper-productive in some ways due to my multitasking abilities, but if I had to write something longer than a paragraph for work I would be stumped. I would get jittery without looking at my phone. I didn't feel happy, generally. I wasn't unhappy, but I wasn't HAPPY. I'm a generally anxious person already, and I think the fragmented media consumption and output was somehow making that worse (says Dr. Catherine, I have a PhD in internetting). I missed things I used to do. I realized I didn't have hobbies anymore. Isn't that sad? I didn't have hobbies. I mean, I worked out. I volunteered. I ran. I trained for a marathon. That's not nothing. But I didn't cook like I used to. I didn't read as much. I certainly didn't write. I didn't watch new TV shows or movies because... god, this embarrassing... I legit felt that they TOOK TOO MUCH TIME.

Let that sink in. I'd become so accustomed to the instant gratification and access of my phone and social media and my need to look at them constantly that I COULDN'T EVEN FUCKING NETFLIX ANYMORE.

Clearly, the time for change had come.

So here's the deal. I'm signing off from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for nearly two months. Signing off in all senses of the word. I won't post. I won't look at posts. No, not even my BFF's Instagram photos or my boyfriend's tweets. Not my brother's Facebook posts of his kids (ugh, my heart). I won't get alerts. They're all gone from my phone. (Blocking access to these apps has been harder than I thought - the logistics to the steps I'm taking will be written about in an upcoming post.) They've also been blocked on my computers. 

But I'm not gone from the internet entirely. I'll still be checking email (cathdandrews at gmail if you need to reach me) and blogging here (in fact, one of my sincere hopes is that by legitimately forcing myself off places like Twitter and Facebook, I'll be able to write more thoughtfully and regularly). I'm keeping Pinterest because I look at it like three times a week and it makes me happy because pretty things are nice. I'm keeping Feedly to read blogs I like. I'm keeping Slack (because it's invaluable at work. I also have a Friend Slack that I get great enjoyment from because my friends are funny, and that's staying, too). I'm curious about adopting a philosophy of what in my head I'm sort of calling "Slow Internet" (like the Slow Food movement) - trying to use the internet in a thoughtful, productive, and enjoyable way.

I'm instituting a few other new rules, too. When I wake up, no looking at the phone - just stretching and meditation for 10 minutes. When I walk somewhere, it's fine to listen to music or a podcast, but I'm not allowing myself to take out my phone to look at it unless I need to text somebody that I'm running late. I will accept the fact that sometimes it's okay - necessary, even - to just stare at a wall at a doctor's office for 15 minutes instead of mindlessly scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And definitely no falling asleep with my phone. Sorry, phone. I'll miss your sweet face.

Anyways. We'll see how it goes. I have high hopes. Today, I walked 20 minutes to a coffee shop, read a book for 20 minutes, and walked 20 minutes back. I looked at my phone about five times, and took a few photos so I could pick the best one to post to Instagram later. (I'm currently in Wyoming and it's gorgeous here, so I'm cutting myself a little bit of slack.)

But that's it. Starting November 16th, it'll be two months without some of the things I've become closest to over the past few years. But it's okay. As the photo below reminds me, I do have better things to do. It'll be nice to get back at them. 

Blogs with real writing

I've taken no pains to hide my disdain for the current state of blogging as I see it. I'm not sure I've written necessarily very extensively about it here, but my disdain basically takes this shape: "UGH PINTEREST RECIPES LIFESTYLE BLOGGING $$$ TOP TEN TIPS CRAFTS CHILDREN I ONLY SHOOT WITH AN SLR ETC ETC ETC OH GOD I'M SO UNHAPPY"

I feel like over the past five years I've watched as my favorite personal bloggers have taken a deep dive into the pool of corporate partnerships and sponsors. Money's great for them, but not so great for their content. (If I have to see another Dooce photoshopped montage about, like, the top ten pairs of leggings to wear while traveling...) Not that I'm any better than anybody; if I'd ever been offered money, by anyone, I'm talking like $2 or a free cup of Starbucks here, folks, I'd have been perfectly content to turn my blog into whatever any giant media corporation wanted. "YOU WANT ME TO DO A ROUNDUP OF THE TOP TEN ANTHROPOLOGIE CERAMIC OWLS AND IN TURN YOU'LL GIVE ME A $5 CVS GIFT CARD? SIGN ME UP!" Seriously... if anyone's still reading... hit me up. I come cheap.

Anyways. The fact is, as I'm trying to come back more to blogging, I've been stumbling across a few blogs that still have that magic I look for -- good personal writing about day-to-day life experiences. Some, I've actually been reading all along (thank you for never changing) and a few are more new to me. And I wanted to share them with you, too.

30 While 30: Blog More

Wondering what this is? I turn 30 on January 11th. Every day until then, I'm listing 30 goals I'd like to accomplish in my 30th year. If you have an idea for me, leave a comment!

#19: Blog more. I know this sort of falls into the "too vague to be any good" area of resolutions I discussed a few posts back. Also it's a resolution I literally make every year, and rarely live up to. But I've found this 30 while 30 enterprise very satisfying in terms of how much it forces me to blog, and reflect, and look forward, and plan. Also, it hasn't really taken up as much time as I feared it would, so I realize blogging more is quite doable.

So let's make this a bit more concrete: I will blog at least twice a week in 2010.

Have a very happy New Year's Eve, all! Enjoy your nights, and stay safe.

>> You can see the full list of everything I'm thankful for over the past year here

>> I'm writing about 30 things I plan to do in my 30th year. You can see those here.

30 Things I'm Thankful For: Google Reader

Note: While I'm taking the time to look ahead to 2010 and my 30th year, I don't want to forget that I had a pretty spectacular 2009. So I'm going to take the next 30 days to also look back on moments from the past year that moved me and for which I'm thankful.

#17: Google Reader and our dorky little group of Google Reader friends. Guys, you know I love the internet. We all do. Who wouldn't? Crazy people, that's who. But every once in a while even I feel...tired. Of the internet. It's all been there, done that, same old tweets, blog posts, and no, I don't need to see that damned video of that damned cat yet again.

What makes me excited about the internet time and time again? It's the potential for communities. I first experienced this with IRC back in high school, when we had an amazing Radiohead IRC chat room on #dalnet that turned into several real-life friendships (and mindblowing concert experiences). God, that might have been the nerdiest sentence I ever typed...anyways. Then I experienced it again when I first started a personal blog and met all sorts of wonderful people that way. Then again, with DCist. Then again, with Unfogged.com and their wonderful commenting community which turned into the Flophouse hosting two real-life internet parties (UnfoggedCons, as we called them).

And now? The same sort of thing is unfolding on Google Reader. Sure, it's a nice little RSS reader, but the value is really in the items that are shared by my friends and contacts, and the discussions that take place in the comment fields. They're fun, and often the highlight of my internet day. Jake and I were talking about lessons learned from "Up in the Air" the other day and he said something about how he thought George Clooney had the right strategy right from the beginning and we were talking about families and then, something something...and somewhere in this eloquent re-telling of this conversation he said that Google Reader was starting to feel like a family and so he might have to drop it (taking Clooney's isolation strategy to heart).

And it is! Our weird, dorky, good-link-sharing, inside-joke-loving, late-night-typo-filled-drunk-ranting family. Like.

>> You can see the full list of everything I'm thankful for over the past year here

>> I'm writing about 30 things I plan to do in my 30th year. You can see those here. 

Catherine Comments

Goddamn, but commenting has become an annoying thing, hasn't it? It used to be so simple: Somebody blogged, if you wanted to say something back, you left a comment on their blog. And internet harmony ensued!

Nowadays, though, I get precious few comments on my blog. However, I get a fair amount of comments on my blog through Facebook (I import my blog feed into there). I often Twitter my blog posts, and plenty of times people will @ me something insightful. And I know that as of right now, I actually read most of my stuff through Google Reader (and plenty of people are reading my blog through there or other RSS readers) and I would LOVE, NAY, FREAKING LOVE, the ability to comment on a post within Google Reader (or whatever RSS service). It's practically impractical to have to click through to the blog post through the RSS reader and then leave a comment. Not just impractical: INHUMAN!

Also: The people who leave insightful comments on my actual blog aren't having their comments read by the people who leave insightful thoughts through Facebook who aren't having their insightful comments left on Twitter or wherever else.

Can there please just be one magical thing where one person can comment and see all the other comments? AM I ASKING TOO MUCH? Does this thing already exist? If so, please tell me about it! Because as of right now I am floating in a field of many different comment places and it is annoying for me, and therefore I assume annoying for the entire universe.