Nobloggy But Me

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2018-04-15 08:00:00-04:00 No comments

It's weird to bump into people who think that blogging is some archaism along the lines of writing with a quill pen on vellum. For one, blogging never "died"; if you look in, say, academic circles, or various other verticals, you find whole clouds of bloggers who are keeping the art and craft of it alive and well. But if all you know is Facebook and Twitter and Medium — which are to the Internet as Cheez Whiz and marshmallow fluff are to unprocessed foods — then of course that stuff isn't even going to register to you.

If there's one thing I hope most will result from the ongoing backlash against Facebook specifically and commercial social media in general, it's that we have a renewal of interest in what I guess could be called artisinal social media: blogs, RSS feeds, activity streams powered by open protocols, that kind of thing. This stuff never really died anyway; it was just overshadowed by its more marketable and approachable commercial cousins.

There's any number of other reasons why the blogging approach seems to have more going for it. Blogging is more deliberate, less impulsive. One of the downsides of making it preposterously easy to broadcast what you have to say to the world is that you discover very quickly most people have very little to say worth hearing. The ones who do have something to say make the best of whatever's in front of them.

A confession. I was always a bit of a snob for making the barrier to entry just high enough to keep out everyone who wasn't really dedicated enough to master it. I am not proud of this line of thought; if there's one thing I've learned to be skeptical of, it's whenever I have a thought that leans towards elitism or snobbery. I liked the idea that FB/Tw/M made it technologically less painful to reach the world, because a lot of the noncommercial solutions offered in that vein were and still are notoriously unfriendly to the nontechnical user. But I don't like how all that came at the cost of turning us into a product.