I think the blog as a communications form has been severely under-hyped. I mean, it's now been around for how long? I know I had a proto-blog -- two proto-blogs -- going as early as 1995. The only difference between them and this was that no one could leave a comment.
They didn't have names. Things like them were simply called "home pages" or something similar (oddly enough, this obsolete term is still in major use in, of all places, Japan, who call any website a "ho-mu peiji").
I think GeoCities was the place they first exploded on, again, about four years after I was doing that thing which didn't yet have a name: "blogging." GeoCities made it easy for anyone who don't know any HTML to make a page about something. Looking back, they were laughably primitive (that's going to be almost twenty years pretty soon, people!) but they were so completely new that no wonder they didn't have a name.
There simply was no previous equivalent. People didn't write and publish their own personal newspaper. They kept diaries, I suppose.
But now, as I contemplate this blog and ask myself "Why?" all I can come up with is "Why not?"
But the old guard seems to have folded up their tents and stolen away into the desert. Blork rarely posts anything any more. Jim Donahue keeps posting despite what he says is an extremely dwindled readership. I do not see why. Both those guys had/have extremely interesting blogs. They were/are extraordinary places to go, part of a regular circuit of the Web that I'm sure all of you have. "Hmm, let's see what's going on in Blork's world today . . ."
I wish I could say "Well, every blog has its day" or "You can't teach an old blog new tricks" or call Blork "The Blogfather" but I can't. Why is that? Because the venerable blog has been replaced by that venue of complete and utter destination of all things banal called Facebook.
Quite frankly, I can't -- never have, never will -- see the appeal in Facebook. MySpace. Remember that? Hey, it's still there!!! Not dead! Yes! You thought it was dead but it is not dead!!!
And I count the seconds that inexorably tick by for that first stirring, that first intimation, that first frisson of excitement that is going to indicate that the public's fascination with public navel-gazing has finally begun to flag. Finally . . . begun . . . to . . . flag. No signs yet, Flock, no signs yet! But as the arbiter of all things based on, or stemming from, HTML, I predict that Facebook has ALREADY begun the long slide into oblivion . . . we just can't see it for all them trees.
My S/O is still firmly entrenched, a Member Until Death, grimly "liking" and "friending" and "defriending" and checking in every six minutes, I regret to say . . . but take heart -- Facebook is not long for this world. I predict that by the year 2018 Facebook will be a receding nightmare for most of the planet, just a remnant of an experiment gone horribly wrong . . . kind of like . . . TWITTER. Yes, that abortion of a new form of communication will also be joining its buddies LinkedIn, Facebook and other similar DOA concepts to be replaced by . . .
Ah! The eternal question. What abomination will cross the mind of some Mountain-Dew-eyed freshman, even as I type sitting around, unwashed and wolfing down a slice of Domino's pizza and dreaming of a new way to become an instant billionaire and major buddy of Charlie Sheen? What's it gonna be, huh, people?
Are YOU going to join the other 4 billion sheep who march to the drums of a "Coldplay II -- the Revenge," or are you going to actually just raise your hand and say, "Enough! I WILL NOT be lured into eternal lameness, will not follow, blindly braying a common chorus of the faceless masses who jostle around me as they shamble into the Void into which all intelligence gets sucked, screaming, that big black hole from whence no one ever returns?"
Hey, if you want me, give me a call. I'll still be here.
Well, to be fair, Twitter and Facebook are enough for most people. I personally don't like FB, but it doesn't stop me from going in there pretty much every day, even if just for a few minutes. I have friends and relatives who have no interest in reading blog posts but they like to "socialize," so that's where I find them.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit like comparing a dinner party (blogs) to a cocktail party (FB). At a dinner party you can have interesting conversations that have some depth, while a cocktail party is pretty much just superficial hellos and small talk, which for the most part I dislike but it has its place.
Twitter is a whole other phenomenon. Personally, I use it like a big fat Sunday paper that comes every day. It's not the tweets themselves that are interesting, it's the links. I follow a bunch of smart people who link to articles in magazines, and I even follow some of the magazines themselves. So ironically, for me Twitter is all about reading articles, not 140 character tweets.
But I like to think that blogs have their place, and I still maintain that I'm going to outlast Facebook. ;-)
My biggest problem is that I've become more and more fussy about my own "publishing," so I won't let anything go out if it's just banged together. But a proper blork-approved post can take hours to draft and rewrite until I get it right, and I don't seem to have the time or energy for that so much these days.
Blork,
ReplyDeleteKnowing you and the seriousness with which you take your blogging responsibilities, i can completely understand where you're coming from.
I treat my blog more as a personal scrapbook of whatever I happen to think of at any particular moment. I can see by the data that a lot of people stop by, but they're all transients. I have no true followers. I don't think I've had a comment in a year until yours.
So my posts are pretty much disposable. I'll go back and read ones I posted a year ago and not remember writing them at all.
But I don't have that urge to see what friends and relatives are doing . . . on Facebook, I must have found at least 20 people from my long ago past, people who were great friends at the time . . . and guess what? After the initial "Hey, wow, it's you!" I never heard another word from them.
Twitter . . . I'll leave that to senators flashing their private parts and Justin Bieber.