Horse 1105 - Why Bother With a Blog?

From the Cat and Girl webcomic:
http://catandgirl.com/?p=2596

Or some friendly advice from Wired.com:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I find the idea that the blog is dead to be an interesting yet strangely familiar proposal. Even if I look around my own little corner of the blogosphere of things that I regularly read, I find that the average time between posts for 2009-10 has now run out to 36.84 days and that the average word count is a paltry 163 words, or a little over three paragraphs.

Of course this was always to be expected anyway. We live in both a post-modern and post-literate society (though I think that it's tending more towards outright illiteracy). People for the most part are suspicious of the concepts of objective truth, and the idea of postliteracy is one where pictures, video and audio replaces the written word for the most part.

Of course we can see actual evidence of this all around us. The Sydney Morning Herald is suffering from falling revenues as readers move online, but coupled with this is that the physical newspaper itself is shrinking. What used to be a hefty daily document, has now more or less become a slimline three section thing, with only the Saturday edition retaining its former chunkiness.

Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451 published all the way back in 1953, seems to predict the trend towards post-literacy. It's not too big a jump to conceive that "the bees in people's ears, swept away the silence no leaving any time to think or question" could be speaking about people's iPods or that the giant screens installed in people's living rooms (parlors) are the equivalent of today's flat-screen, plasman, LCD, Jumbotrons.

"The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it's a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily. Can you dance faster than the White Clown, shout louder than 'Mr. Gimmick' and the parlor 'families'? If you can, you'll win your way, Montag. In any event, you're a fool. People are having fun."

That's just it isn't it. People are having fun. People for the most part can't be bothered to read any more than a couple of lines of their own accord. Short of the odd person who still happens to read a novel for fun, the vast bulk of people simply choose not to read. Twitter and Facebook are immensely successful, because can't be bothered to read.

Of course the obvious question which arises from Wired's article is why bother to continue writing a blog if no-one is going to read it? Why bother yelling into the darkness if you know you won't be heard?

Because I can... but am I having fun?