This blog is a blog about blogs. (How postmodern!) A recent post that has been getting some attention in the blogosphere (a term that itself deserves some discussion, but more on that later) proclaimed "R.I.P. The Blog!" It argued that long-form blogs have been eclipsed by services like Twitter or Tumblr as main sources of information and commentary.
That might be true, but I don't think it is an issue with the structure and form of blogs themselves. The rise of 140-character snippets reflects an increasing impatience with reading and writing, unrelated to the notion of the blog. (A parallel phenomenon is occurring with newspapers, of course.) Witness the rise of article titles written just to grab links. Popular web articles are increasingly filled with ads, GIFs, and memes, not interesting analysis and actual text. One of my favorite web blogs, Daring Fireball, covers technology -- without images. It is a pure-text blog, so it has to draw its readers solely through its incisive commentary and actually interesting links.
Look at the alternative: Buzzfeed, the world's favorite source of lists like Top Ten Vapid and Cringe-worthy Things I Saw on Buzzfeed Today! The blog as a form loses out to nonsense like this because the average web surfer glances at a page only momentarily before moving on. Our collective attention spans are so short that we find reading even a few paragraphs tedious.
Especially with the proliferation of blogs, it is hard to spend time reading each one in depth. I use feedly, an RSS reader, to keep up with all the different websites, online think tanks, and blogs that I read, but often over 200 articles pop up per day. It is impossible for me to read each one, so I skim the list of article titles, hoping to find something that catches my attention. I then skim the articles that I've opened up to see if I'm interested in reading them more closely. Out of the 200 original articles, I'll probably end up reading ten stories in depth.
Often, what will grab my eye is an article about something circulating on the internet (or the blogosphere). When something goes "viral," there are invariably the this-is-cool articles that follow, then the this-proves-how-sad-the-internet-is articles that come next, and lastly overly dramatic commentary about the topic of the original to-do. The blogosphere can often become an echo chamber for its own vacuousness.
That's not to say there aren't real blogs saying real things -- the author of the R.I.P. the Blog story noted that himself -- but they're often overwhelmed by the silliness. In the words of my sophomore history teacher, "The internet is full of diamonds...but they are buried in tons and tons of POOP."
Re: The rise of 140-character snippets reflects an increasing impatience with reading and writing, unrelated to the notion of the blog.
ReplyDeleteI wonder which way the causality runs. Have 140-character forums of online discussion reduced our attention span, or has our reduced attention span created demand for websites like Twitter? Perhaps both?
Your post brings up a very good point, and I really enjoyed reading it. What I am wondering though, is whether perhaps this is just technology finally catching up to people. For a long time, people did not have access to that much information. And when they did get information, say in the form of the newspapers, I am guessing that most did not read the paper cover to cover. Or, in the case of library books, how many books were read as compared to those skimmed? When the internet became widespread, it allowed people to access much information for the first time. However, it may be true that people skimmed blogs posts then as well as now. Perhaps sites like twitter and buzzfeed have finally just achieved the human attention span set point, formatting their stories to the effort people would spend reading them regardless.
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