Blogging about technology, the Internet, and life since 2003.
I spend a lot of time, as I’m sure you do, reading content on the Internet. Most times the content is brief: insightful quotes, Twitter updates, how-to articles, etc. Other times the content is longer, or at least more substantial, such as this piece on writing weblogs. I enjoy both, but for distinctly different reasons.
I also spend lots of time, (again) as I’m sure you do, contributing content to the Internet. For my part, most of this content is the more fleeting sort: the Twitter updates, Delicious bookmarks, and Flickr photos that document my day-to-day. For whatever reason I rarely, if ever, contribute the more substantial or personal content: articles, reviews, introspective pieces, or simple observations about life.
Short-form content certainly has its place on the web: I have met some genuinely amazing people through Twitter, arguably the most abbreviated of any content-generating format on the web today, and much of the long-form articles that I’ve found and loved have been discovered by subscribing to the short-form Delicious bookmarks (or link-logs) of people I respect. I worry, though, that the allure of short-form content — with its ease of posting and readability — might drown out more in-depth content, as has surely been the case with my writing.
When I started blogging, in 2003, the Internet seemed very different. It seemed more approachable, more diverse, and more personal. Bloggers seemed more inclined to share what they really thought, allowing their blogs to read like letters to an old friend, than in trying to self-promote. It’s possible that it wasn’t the Internet that was different, but rather myself (I have changed quite a bit since then, so this is surely possible). I imagine the truth is a little bit of both.
Foolishly I never backed-up my blogs in the early years, and as a result my entries (of which there were dozens, if not hundreds) have been lost in the ether. Before launching ianhines.com this past summer I had been the proud owner of no less than three previous domain names (and a Xanga account!), each of which was abandoned, and with it its archives of my personality. This is truly a shame, because there is value in the perspective that old blogs can offer.
In writing this piece I sought to dig up what I could of these old blogs, to see if my recollections of blogging in those early days were accurate. Using the WayBackMachine I found the following excerpt from an entry written in November of 2004, which seems prescient in retrospect:
The thing I like most is when people write to the audience like they are writing to an old friend. Starting in the middle of some conversation that had been going on for days and days. It’s so great because you feel like you’re really good friends when in reality you’re complete strangers.
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it. The Internet is such an interesting thing.
“An interesting thing,” indeed.
Today, more than five years later, my writing habits seem to have changed dramatically. Rather than writing to my readers like old friends, sharing the joys and sorrows of my day-to-day life, I keep them at a distance. Rather than write entries with any meat, I stick to a few safe topics and generally fill my pages with innocuous minutiae that would be unlikely to offend anyone.
The blogging community is plagued by two understandable, but nonetheless unpleasant, phenomenons: an interest in self-promotion and a fear of being dooced. We are simultaneously drawn to the Internet by the sense of community it offers, the ability it grants us to share that part of ourselves that makes us unique and valuable, and terrified by the potential for it to be used against us. Too often, the latter emotion prevails.
Humans prefer order to chaos, certainty to uncertainty, and so it should come as no surprise that when faced with the great uncertainty of what will happen to our livelihood if someone should mis-interpret what is displayed on our websites we begin to self-censor. Rather than boldly say “I’m proud of who I am, I have nothing to fear…” we attempt to craft an image of ourselves that will help us get ahead in the “real” world; in the process, I fear, we fail through our own self-censorship to contribute the very content that would allow us to make our small mark on the world.
There is nothing inherently wrong with short-form content, except that it cannot be the end-all be-all. Blogs, or tumblelogs, filled only with links, photos, reblogged items, and the like fail to grasp the true potential of blogging: to share who you are as a person with the wider world.
You don’t have to be controversial; you don’t have to be particularly interesting, or thought provoking; you don’t have to be anything at all. What you should do is endeavor to be yourself because your life, inherently, is worth sharing with others.
Let the truly private parts of your life stay private. Don’t write in anger. Take pride in your writing, as well as your behavior, as both reflect on you more than you realize. But please, don’t make the mistake of thinking that every piece you write on the web needs to be a conscious act of self-promotion, intellectualism, or professionalism. You really, inherently, have more than that to offer.
Tagged: Blogging