I read that somewhere recently. Can't remember where. In a way, it's obviously false. If anything, the blog format seems to have taken over the internet. It's become really difficult (and kind of useless) to distinguish "websites" from "blogs." A lot of businesses use a blog format to post regular updates about whatever they're promoting or selling or doing. Newspapers and magazines often include multiple blogs by their contributors, and it's a very thin line that separates them from the rest of the content. And then there's the Tumblr explosion that's still going strong. It may be a weird mix of social networking and micro-blogging, but it's still basically a blogging platform. And some users do treat it that way.
But maybe what is no longer "a thing" is the personal blog. The kind you would find on Live Journal 5 or 10 years ago. The kind where regular (and often anonymous) people would talk about their lives and share their thoughts and opinions and feelings about random things. The reason those are a dying breed is that this is pretty much what the whole fucking internet has turned into, with Facebook (and to a lesser extent Twitter) as the kind of matrix that holds it all together.
A few days ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. I never intended it to be permanent, but I was shocked at how traumatic it could be and how unprepared I was for it. The first thing I realized was that I had lost access to my entire social calendar. My weekend plans were ruined, because everything I was planning to do was based on events I'd been invited to. Without Facebook, I no longer had any of that information. I'd also lost contact with a lot of friends. For some of them, I didn't have either a phone number or an e-mail address. The only way I ever communicate with them, except for face-to-face interactions, is through Facebook.
On another level, it was also weird because I realized that everything I do online gets "promoted" on Facebook. I have a handful of people I interact with on Twitter, and my comics blog gets 50 to 100 hits a day, depending on how regularly I post and who links to it, but other than that, everything that I do primarily gets disseminated ("shared") through Facebook. That includes both my own stuff (photos, songs, blog posts, youtube videos) and stuff that I find online and that I want to comment on or simply bring to my friends' attention. Without Facebook, everything I do on the internet seems to happen in a vacuum. Nobody pays any attention to it. Or to me.
Anyway, so blogs aren't a thing anymore. I think it's kinda sad. I recently found some vestiges of my first blog on archive.org's Wayback Machine. I also have a Live Journal that's still online. (Or half of it is, anyway. I started converting every post individually to "private" a while ago, as I don't have the heart to delete it but I don't particularly want it accessible to everyone either. It's a slow process and there's no batch-edit function, so I gave up halfway through.) Reading through old blog posts, a lot of it makes me cringe, but a lot of it also seems valuable. It's too easy to dismiss it all as self-indulgent garbage.
I've been thinking a lot lately about online "sharing" and social networking as a kind of performance. I think we all do this, although some of us are more conscious of it than others. My Facebook wall is definitely calculated, to some extent. I don't share every single video I come across on YouTube. There's some editorializing going on. But everything I post or write on Facebook is so ephemeral and fragmentary. I miss the days when I used to have long discussion with people through e-mail. I was so young and naive. I was trying to figure out who I was and how to relate to the world, and my way to sort through all the chaos in my mind was to try to put it into words for others to read. I was already suspicious of language, but I still believed in it and in communication in a way that I don't anymore.
This is supposed to be some kind of introduction or justification for this blog and why it exists. I don't think I'm doing a very good job at it.
I'm going to post this now, no matter how disjointed and incomplete it seems. And then I'm going to keep posting here probably on an irregular basis. I suspect there'll be periods of intense activity and then extended silences. It's possible that nobody will be paying attention anyway.
