Is social Media killing my blogosphere ?
Sep 19Before you sigh and note that “this is yet another self reflecting belly button staring article about a Blogger pondering the justification of his own activities and writing about ‘writing’ “, let me stop you there. Most of you know, i’m not an ‘active’ blogger, i’m more of an incidental one. So your sigh might not be justified : This might just be an objective observation.
I used to be an avid blogger with an almost daily routine of posting articles about what was going on in my life. But over the years, and as the general topic and target audience of my blog shifted from “life” to “tech” .. that blogging routine has gone a little bit south .. One could call upon the excuse of having “a busy life” as to why not to blog. But in a busy life, lots of stuff happens , so there should be plenty to write about. Or you could also call up “the lack of inspiration” as a possible excuse. But when I see all the things people post on Facebook and Twitter, there is plenty of stuff milling around in their heads, urging them to speak their mind.
So I ask : What IS at the very core of my (personal) decline in posting articles like these ? After reading Peter Hinsens book “The new Normal” one could say that the general message of an article is just “too long”. With the information age speeding up, the attentionspan of our readers narrows down to 140 characters or less. Twitter, Sms, textfields of 1000 characters in Facebook .. All of these call out for a quick and intence form of “blogging” or “microbloggin”. Sift aside the useless messages like ” I just had pizza ” , the endless “@_ discussions” going on between people who should resort to IRC instead of twitter and the foursquare checkins, what are you left with ? Links TO posts, short smart quotes copies of some random websites and loose thoughts that fit into a tiny textbox ? There appears to be no added value over typing out (or reading) a well thoughtout blogpost.
My initial thoughts to blame Twitter and the like for my “blogging atrophy” don’t hold any ground. Twitter (and Facebook AND Google plus) are addictive shortcuts to self expression. “Why write up a whole post when you can just tweet the core message.”, at least that is what I used to think. The truth (for me) is , that Twitter, Facebook and Googleplus offer easier “interfaces” to post my content, but are by far suited for ponderings with a wordcount like this article. But still I use them a lot. Some of my time is spent by interacting with the community, some of my time by respoding to tweets and conversations, but MOST of the time I spend on Social Media are used to “promote” articles, events, podcasts and other things ON the social media. Twitter, Facebook, Googleplus, instead of taking away the very need to blog, they add another layer of work to the very writing of a post. Not only do you need to write it, you also need to cross post it on your serveral social networks in the hope that somebody comes down to read about it.
And then there is the ultimate question : Will people still offer up the attention span to READ through your article ? Will this 140 character based community be able to focus is Information-overloaded-ADD cybermind on your writings ?
Rounding up I find no answer to my question, just a paradox. We don’t blog because we tweet. But tweets cannot contain the message of an entire blogpost. So we DO blog and THEN we tweet. But do the peeps who love the tweets click on your link ? I why do THEY read tweets ? Because blogposts are too long ? So if they click the link in your tweet, do they read your post all the way through ? Well, if you followed this link from twitter, and you read THIS LINE
