Blogging On

Blogging seems to be an almost forgotten expression form in the age of the social media. Most people seem to be content with either dumping their thoughts in some semi-cryptic Facebook status message (I am also guilty of this), or do up some captioned-in-pictures storybook in Instagram, or do some ``micro'' video in the form of TikTok/douyin, or generate a ``tweet storm'' with Twitter.

I no longer know of people who would use a blog for these things any more.

Has blogging gone out of style? In many ways, it is an unqualified yes. The idea of a blog is an old one, coming from the days when technically inclined people who could afford to find hosting and buy a domain name would set up their own personal website and update it semi-frequently with their own web pages of blog-esque content, i.e. in the form of ``news updates''. There was no such thing as a ``social media platform'' in the early days---people are usually anonymous/pseduonymous, and if there was a need to find someone to read his/her views, it would be either through finding their personal web sites, or through interactions on various bulletin boards/fora. This was part of the reason why web directories (the earliest incarnation of web-search in a static form) existed. Connectivity was weak---that screen name on one forum may be the same as the one used in a blog, but there is no indication that they are really the same person/entity.

The natural evolution of that was to create a blogging platform that streamlined the technical process, allowing people to focus more on the content creation. As part of the streamlining process, this meant that people would be creating their own accounts within the platform itself, which meant that they would start to unwittingly form the start of a social network, except that it was not a term that was in wide use until the arrival of Facebook. Suddenly that screen name that was seen in the comments of one forum represent the same person who was updating his/her blog at a certain domain/location that was a sub-domain of the blog platform. The threads of information that were out there were tangling even as time mercilessly marched on.

The single-platform social network has finally arrived.

But as time on, blogging started to phase out in style. This is not necessarily due to the consolidation of the platforms and the migration of users to the newest and hottest. Instead, it is a sign of the general trend of ever-decreasing attention spans, where it is no longer the case that people would have the endurance to read a multi-hundred-word blog entry as opposed to some 140-character abomination filled with strange emojis and funny pictures. Media consumption had decided to prioritise quantity over quality, and many have followed the trend in one way or another.

Me? I'm an antiquated dinosaur, an exotic end-of-the-line evolution path for a technologist. I like writing out multi-hundred-word long blog entries to capture what I am thinking. Occasionally I write shorter stuff in Facebook, but I think I am at the stage where something more substantial than that is required.

And so, I am still writing here, some fifteen years on.

Till the next update I suppose.