IN DEFENSE OF BLOGGING

It’s a sad day in the blogosphere. In spite of or perhaps because of my efforts to the contrary, the people I once saw as my readership are dropping like flies.

Where once I could often get a dozen or more comments, now I’m lucky if I get five. I know it’s not a quality issue nor is it a posting frequency issue, which I proved a few months back.

Many of these good people have defected to other, inferior social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Apparently creating an account at a different site means disregarding the previous one. There is precedent. Remember how hugely popular the Yahoo! message boards were in the late nineties and early 2000’s? I thought those things would never lose popularity. But they did. People still post comments on the main news story boards but nobody is creating their own anymore. At one time I excelled at that, generating topics that brought in hundreds of comments.

So I’ve been here before. The difference is those were just topics for discussion. This is my writing. These are commentaries I take the time to sit down and write. The fact that people were also taking the time to read them was an incredible high, seconded only by the fact that people also felt the need to comment.

Thanks to Facebook, that feeling has been rendered a memory. Apparently, that site has a greater sex appeal because of its immediacy and that it doesn’t require much work. Basically, all one needs to participate on Facebook is a login and a quick “mood” update. I like the site but it is no replacement for the expression and discussion of ideas. Blogging is what changed the political landscape of this country, for better or worse.

When the mainstream media was ignoring George W’s trespasses and giving him a free pass, it was bloggers who pointed out that the emperor had holes in his underwear. Blogging became the method by which town hall meetings took place all across the nation. News articles and radio talk show hosts began quoting bloggers and political campaign strategists looked for ways to use them to gauge public opinion and, in some shameful moments, manipulate it.

Absolutely none of that is taking place on Facebook. Why? If you’ll forgive the analogy, let’s say Blogger is your socially conscious, spiritual uncle while Facebook is your superficial, fad-chasing teenage daughter with a heart of gold. Neither of them is a bad person but only one is doing anything that matters.

It’s been years since I actively went out and sought new readers and new blogs to read but apparently that time has come. Facebook isn’t quite cutting it. It’s fun to check from time to time and the ability to put up links to blog posts is a good way to increase response (although nobody seems to notice them) but writing anything of substance there is almost as useless as doing it on MySpace.

Most of those who no longer comment here are in my Facebook friends list. I guess that’s where they prefer to be these days. But for me, it’s a nice place to visit…you know the rest.

As David Byrne once sang, “Home is where I want to be/pick me up and turn me round.”

I watched the Yahoo message boardS die due to lack of interest but I don’t think that’s the case here. I think it’s the people I called my vultures and their particular personality types. There are still hundreds if not thousands of blogs out there and I don’t think they’re going away any time soon. Reinvention is good for the soul. I guess I’ll get to it~