Late night thoughts on the blogging thing
I decided to take a break, a continuing one so far it seems, from Facebook, a few months ago. I miss the exchange at times but, in the end, it wasn't good for my health. That is a long story and not worth going into further. I've gone back to this blog, fitfully it may seem, but possibly fairly regularly. I did try tumblr, by the way, but didn't seem to get into the swing of it. Twitter is an unknown and untried world and remains so, for now.
The advantage of a blog over Facebook and other insulated social media platforms is that it doesn't require a subscription to read it, and the posts are much easier to track and recover/re-read. This was a frustration I had with Facebook, though probably not the primary reason I left. Indeed, I have darted back (reactivated is the technical term, I believe) once or twice for a brief five minute foray, simply to check on something posted on x date and/or about y bit of business. No-one noticed.
In the heyday of blogging, in the early to mid-2000s, the platform was alive with poets and poetry, and certainly exchanges (who remembers web 2.0?). This included comments and responses amongst us all. Times have changed, as they obviously do. I've not had one comment, nor sign of one, since coming back to this in 2015. Nor, I admit, have I gone to other blogs and commented. I have gone to other blogs but have wondered what I would say. And a lot of the people I previously interacted with regularly seem to be doing other things, online or off-line. As I obviously was. I hope they are all thriving in whatever they are doing.
I live now in a small city where conversation is scarce if one is, effectively, an outsider (I don't count classes as conversation, they are different exchanges, valuable as exchanges, but of a different kind). Conversation happens, thankfully but rarely, and my thanks go to the few here in Adelaide who take time out to chat and discuss things of mutual interest.
Thus, I count this space as where I talk to myself, which I believe is a human and necessary thing to do, as well as somewhere to record what I have been doing and writing and/or what has interested me. I don't fool myself that it is a space for anything more than that. Also, it occurs to me that what I'm currently doing is not much different to what I was doing way back when, except that it emerges more from my own internal to-and-fro rather than a broader communal working. The one thing that may be a positive, apart from the purely archival (which is not to be dismissed), is that this blog still has a public presence, it's not an interior or private space. I don't know who visits these days, but I know there are 'visits'. Just as other bloggers don't know I visit them, though I do. This is something I am continuing to think about and is another way of saying I haven't gone completely away.
The advantage of a blog over Facebook and other insulated social media platforms is that it doesn't require a subscription to read it, and the posts are much easier to track and recover/re-read. This was a frustration I had with Facebook, though probably not the primary reason I left. Indeed, I have darted back (reactivated is the technical term, I believe) once or twice for a brief five minute foray, simply to check on something posted on x date and/or about y bit of business. No-one noticed.
In the heyday of blogging, in the early to mid-2000s, the platform was alive with poets and poetry, and certainly exchanges (who remembers web 2.0?). This included comments and responses amongst us all. Times have changed, as they obviously do. I've not had one comment, nor sign of one, since coming back to this in 2015. Nor, I admit, have I gone to other blogs and commented. I have gone to other blogs but have wondered what I would say. And a lot of the people I previously interacted with regularly seem to be doing other things, online or off-line. As I obviously was. I hope they are all thriving in whatever they are doing.
I live now in a small city where conversation is scarce if one is, effectively, an outsider (I don't count classes as conversation, they are different exchanges, valuable as exchanges, but of a different kind). Conversation happens, thankfully but rarely, and my thanks go to the few here in Adelaide who take time out to chat and discuss things of mutual interest.
Thus, I count this space as where I talk to myself, which I believe is a human and necessary thing to do, as well as somewhere to record what I have been doing and writing and/or what has interested me. I don't fool myself that it is a space for anything more than that. Also, it occurs to me that what I'm currently doing is not much different to what I was doing way back when, except that it emerges more from my own internal to-and-fro rather than a broader communal working. The one thing that may be a positive, apart from the purely archival (which is not to be dismissed), is that this blog still has a public presence, it's not an interior or private space. I don't know who visits these days, but I know there are 'visits'. Just as other bloggers don't know I visit them, though I do. This is something I am continuing to think about and is another way of saying I haven't gone completely away.
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