Blogging is dead

There’s a question that has been vexing me of late. Even though I’ve been posting something almost every day, I have been wondering whether personal blogging is in fact dead. I was therefore delighted to find this piece written by one of my favourite non-bird bloggers, Emma aka Waffle. Please go away and read it and then come back (the link is entirely safe). I’ll go make a cup of tea.

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Done?

So what did you think? I have been wanting to write this piece or something like it for several months, but now I don’t have to as Emma has done it already, and far better than I ever could have. In simple terms it comes down to the interplay and life-cycle of catharsis and connection. Does a blogger write for themselves or for others? I think it always starts as the former. Surely only very infrequently does someone stand up and declare “The world needs to know about my life.” and then start a blog. Or a reality TV show. No, it’s a release done purely for personal reasons. For me, without going back to the very start I couldn’t actually remember why I started it in January 2009. However reading that firstpost suggests that it was dark and cold, that I was bored, and that other people were writing blogs so why not me? Knowing myself as I do, boredom was and is probably the key element here. As an aside, it also highlights that my love of double deckers existed even then, and that in 2009 my patch list was a mere 89. 89!! Eight years later I am on the dizzy heights of 146, and these days would expect to see 89 birds every year by about May. How things change. But I digress, this post isn’t about that.

About a month later I lost my job of 11 years and the process of writing something, anything, became a little bit more important. Stuck at home with a one year old and a three year old, it became less about birds and more about the minutae of my life. As you would expect the first 20 or so posts sank without trace, and it wasn’t until March that the first comment appeared, from none other than NQS (ex!)writer Gavin H. In the context of this current post this amuses me greatly. I did nothing whatsoever to advertise the fact I was writing it, or at least I don’t think I did, but somehow he found it, and so too did a number of other people. The next 20 posts also mostly sank without trace, but gradually in that first year I started to get what I hesitantly call a following. I hesitate as that sounds awfully big-headed, but we’re only talking about miniscule numbers of people and this is what Blogger itself calls it. I renamed it to Acolytes of course, it seemed only right.

Anyway, thus starts the next phase of personal blogging. The move from writing for yourself to satisfy some kind of inner-need, to writing knowing that other people are reading it, and that those other people may have some kind of connection to what you’re writing. You write differently of course, or I assume you do, and I am sure I did. I cannot pin down exactly what changes, but I think it largely comes down to caring more about whether what you write is actually decent, rather than just bashing something out and hitting publish without much thought. Emma has hit the nail on the head when she writes about the pressure, not imagined but real, to write something “good enough”. Good enough for the 100 people that might read it? Hah! You’ve not clue as to who 90 of them are, but somehow it still matters. You begin to interact with people whether you know them or not. Comments are eagerly anticipated. One blog post spurs another blogger to pick up the theme. One comment spawns a dozen. A tentative community somehow develops, especially on blogs that contain much heartfelt angst. I’ve never really had that, I’ve not laid my life bare as some have, and typically it is the stupider posts that seem to generate the most interest. Especially those with mildly fruity titles that Google searches may misinterpret.

This state of affairs continues for a while. It might be months, it might be years, but eventually this community, such that it ever was, declines. Disappears. It’s like that bit in Amélie where the old guy crosses off another deceased friend in his address book. If I look at that list of my favourite blogs over on the right there are many that are no longer there, many that I have sadly deleted. Of those that are left, some have been inactive for several months and their time is probably up. I note that as they drop off there is not much of a queue of worthy replacements. If not quite dead, personal blogging does indeed seem to be very seriously ill.

Ironically enough I blame social media. I don’t use many of these apps, Twitter and Whatsapp only, but surely the demise of blogging has a lot to do with the condensation of what little material there ever was into 140 characters or a quick photo. In the past I’d have written a whole post on a bird, and sometimes I still do. However I frequently now simply ‘tweet’ out a photo of the back of my camera and move on. It is the modern way. People can ‘like’ it with the prod of finger and also move on. It’s quick, it’s efficient, it requires almost no effort from any of us. You need not have an attention span longer than ten seconds. Why bother reading a post about a Yellow-browed Warbler hours later that evening when you can vicariously see the bird on the phone in your pocket two minutes after it has been discovered? As a further irony I sometimes tweet links to my latest blog post and sometimes people prod a finger at that too. Like. But that singular prod largely eliminates any possibility of community and commonality.  Am I suggesting that as a society we are becoming ever more vacuous?  I think I am.

By the way, this post isn’t a lengthy proxy for “leave more comments you ungrateful bastards”. Far from it. Time is at a premium, I understand that, and as people move into middle age (very early middle age in my case) I am experiencing this first hand and I am sure it is no different for most of my generation. I am busier than ever before. But nonetheless the demise is a shame. Blogging has only lasted a decade. I’ve been going for over seven years now, and as you may have guessed from the title of this post I'm feeling that it, and me, are on the way out. I’m not sure I need it any more, and I can fairly confidently say that nobody else really does either. Oddly enough though I’ve been bashing out more posts recently than at any time since 2013, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. A late and final flourish perhaps? And I’ve got half a dozen things lined up that last week and this weekend triggered the “oooh, I could write about that” instinct and that I filed away in whatever bit of my brain stores these nuggets. Feeding birds in my garden. Chequebook twitching. Sweet and delicious karma. How I’m not the only person to leave Shetland before a biggie (OK so those last two might be related…). A binocular craving. An obsession with temperature. How I am probably more stressed than ever but feeling incredibly relaxed.

Anyway, if you have ever blogged, or been a regular reader of a blog, please do go and read that link above. What I’ve written can’t possibly do it justice, and yes it’s a bit emotional and ‘deep’ in a way that Wansteadbirder never was or is ever likely to be, but nonetheless it resonates strongly, and it may do so with you too.