In February of 2005, Randy and I started a blog on Google’s Blogger service. The idea was that we would post our opinions on Movies, TV, Music, video games etc. and someone would eventually stumble across it and begin to pay us for our awesome writing skills and pop culture observations. What actually happened was that we ended up documenting a period in our lives, before we started working full time and were having a lot of boozy adventures, probably way too far into our adulthood. However, I did put in a lot of effort and wrote a lot of stuff that I’m pretty proud of, we even had an essay contest that had, at least, our group of friends talking about it.
Three major things have happened since 2005 that for all intents and purposes shut the blog down. The first is that I began working full time and a lot of the wasted days that were so interesting to write and read about came to an end. MySpace, Blogs and the internet in general were becoming more accessible than ever and I began to worry that if I wrote about work, someone would eventually see it.
The second, is that I got a cell phone. My job made me get one. I was like the last hold out on getting a cell phone and I wonder sometimes, if my job didn’t make me carry it, if I still wouldn’t have it. Anyway, I absolutely fell in love with texting. I could instantly send my thoughts and ideas out to a dozen people at a time. Really at that point, thats what the blog was all about. But with texting, people had to tune in. It was passive, they didn’t have to go searching for my latest post, it was sent to them and they eventually had to read it. Not only that, but because of the format, I had to be brief and did not have to spend time to flesh out a thought or even censor myself. My thoughts were laid bare in 100 character messages. In 2005 we had 474 post, the next year was a little over half that and then a little over half that the next year. 2007-2008 held pretty steady but by then we were at a quarter of our production of 2005. In 2009 production fell off by half again and in 2010 there were only 18 posts.
The third and most devastating thing to happen to the blog was Facebook. Status updates killed blogging for the casual blogger. Once everyone was on Facebook, I could post any random thought and it didn’t even have to be particularly interesting and I could get almost instant feedback from my friends, with hardly any effort. And what has become clear to me is that I crave that feedback. I don’t really write for myself, I’ve never really been a journal keeper, I write for an audience, I fancy myself a writer. Not in any real way, of course, but I feel like I have limited ability to entertain with the written word. I’m no good at telling stories orally, but give me a chance to revise and rewrite and I can spin a yarn from time to time. So, I’ll admit it, every single thing I post on Facebook is to elicit a response from those who read it. If I post something, and get no comments, I’m always disappointed. And I’m always puzzled when I see other people post something like “Off to take a nap” and they end up with 15 comments. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not down on Facebook, I like Facebook and I know that Facebook will allow you to blog, but I don’t think anyone digs that deep on my page to read a blog. Obviously there was nothing stopping me from continuing to post on my blog, its just that posting on Facebook was always so much easier and most of the time it provides almost instant gratification. A lot of times when I’m trying to compose a blog post, I get off on a rant and can’t find my way back to the point and just abandon the post altogether.
So that brings us to the present and explains why I gave up the pleasure of writing long winded, mostly embellished daily adventure stories. But something happened over the last few days that has made me want to go dark on Facebook for a while and try to get back to a more, to my mind, artful way of expressing myself on the blog. Here goes, talk about burying the lead...
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