I miss my old habit of blogging regularly. It used to make me happy.

I like the idea of cultivating one’s garden1 online. But somehow the tools have become harder to use, or just less accessible, which for me amounts to the same thing. The end result is less writing.

I don’t think this is unusual. To browse the remains of the blogosphere in recent times is to see that many blogs just faded out around 2014-16. It feels like the Web’s own version of the Rapture. The righteous seemingly vanished. They ascended to Facebook and Twitter I guess. Only sinners were left down here in the blogs. But besides this great shift there is something else remarkable about the experience of writing online. It relates to the general shift from PC to mobile. Clearly this is a great leap forward. It is a kind of technophile dream to have an always connected computer in your pocket. But as Neil Postman reminds us, progress isn’t linear - it’s ecological.[2] Every technological ‘improvement’ changes the whole ecosystem, and not everywhere for the better. As we spend more time on my phone there is less time left over for the old (relatively productive) way of doing things.

But some of us just like it down here in the blogs. The mission, then: to find ways of writing more, more often; to find and use new ways of working that can support a justified feeling of accomplishment.

Links:

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media ecology