I miss blogs.
I don’t mean I miss writing them. I have never been much of a blogger, as anyone looking over this particular site can probably guess. No, I miss reading them. There was something fascinating about that period when it seemed like anyone and everyone had a blog. It was a window into the minds of strangers. In contrast to Instagram, which I find to be largely about surficial presentation, blogs were (are?) about content. For this reason they were harder to fake. One can, of course, write anything down and it may or may not be true. I could write here that I have a black belt in Judo and run a business deploying snakes as pest control, and the casual reader would not be able to know if it were true or not. (In my case, even a less-casual reader might have a difficult time tracking down the truth of any particular statement I make, as Maddy is a pseudonym.)
But what can’t be faked in writing (at least I don’t think it can) is the voice. The voice is what tells the reader, there is an underlying, substantial truth here, even if the superficial is false. It’s what Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called quality.
Blogs were a window into quality of so many kinds. Of course, there were lots of low-quality blogs out there, but it didn’t matter; in the freeform days of early blogging, there were so many different blogs with so many different goals out there that it was easy to find interesting, unusual, and high-quality writing within them.
I am not an internet historian and I wasn’t even really a dedicated blog reader, so I don’t know what happened with blogs – I just noticed that many of the ones I liked to read went dark, or the authors stopped posting, and that I wasn’t finding new blogs that I liked to read. Some time after I noticed this, I discovered a lot of people (online and off) commenting that blogs are dead. Presumably people have written about why blogging died, and maybe I will try to track those writings down. But as a casual reader I wonder if it was monetization that killed the blog as an art form. There are still blogs, sure, but so many of them now are just marketing devices for the blog author or composed nearly entirely of sponsored posts (i.e., marketing devices for various products).
And so they are boring.
I guess it’s funny to write about this in a blog post. I didn’t start posting on this site until well after the golden age of blogs, and I sometimes wonder why I do it. I don’t do it for the traffic (which is good, since I get so little) and, as I write here as my reader/writer self rather than my professional self, I tend to neglect it when my professional life gets busy (hence the numerous long hiatuses in posting). But I keep coming back to it…perhaps because I miss reading blogs, and if I can’t find any to read, the only way to address that is to blog myself.