I was going to title this post “To blog, or to microblog”, but I’m not quite sure if “to blog” is grammatically correct or not (if it is in the dictionary, I will headbutt the table rather theatrically, and make disgusted murmurings about the erosion of the English language).
While life and work have recently conspired to restrict my participation in any online activities to speak of, it has afforded me a perspective on the communities I frequent that I would otherwise not have had.
It would appear that the Twitter bubble has burst - or rather, the unwashed masses have exposed themselves as more lazy, shallow and disinterested than most had perhaps predicted they would be. The great majority of plebs on twitter post only about themselves, never reply, never send direct messages, and never invest any effort in contributing to the community.
There is more wrong with Twitter than most users realise; the service itself encourages thoughtless output of banality. Considered opinion is impossible, and each voice becomes drowned within the flood. Conversations are hopelessly disjointed, and there are very few controls to prevent marketers from scraping relational data from the system.
More worryingly, I have noticed that the blogs I used to follow and enjoy on a daily basis are slowly drying up. Perhaps a form of natural selection is at work - perhaps my own relative disconnection from the internet in general has been shared by the group? Who knows.
I look forward to the return of those I read, and the return of “blogging” in general - the shared and considered thoughts and experiences of a self-made community spanning the globe as we go about our “normal life” - which of course is relative.
Why do we find each other’s lives so fascinating? One thing is for sure - you cannot express how good or bad your day has been in 140 characters. You need paragraphs, punctuation (shock horror!), and at least a passing knowledge of the rules of grammar in order to form coherent posts that appeal to, draw in, and endear those who stop to read.
Is it all about what we are sharing, or about the readers who happen upon it?