Ayep. They’re over. Back in 2005—I was still over at Tabulas, then—the entire blogging experience was a new, exciting trend. There were thousands of fresh new voices to read over the Internet, aside from the corporate websites that one visited to get new information about the next upcoming Megaman game. And I liked it. I was part of it. I was hipster blogging before hipster even became a word.
Today, you come across blogs that are so spic-and-span, almost clinical to the eye. You hardly see those blogs that looked like guerilla warfare vets hiding in the jungle. That’s because all these new journals are either catering to a given niche, trying to tap into the dwindling non-social media resources of web 2.0, or trying to sound more pretentious than they really are (which is REALLY pretentious).
Can’t say I blame ‘em, though. If I read the blogs of the people I connected with over Tabs nearly a decade ago now, I’d probably lose interest in five minutes. One can only take so much of the minutiae of the daily humdrum lives of the individual journal keeper, eager to strike a poignant nerve in some hapless reader’s heart or mind (I remember the atheists in Tabs—what a riot those guys were), before wishing for the capacity to will oneself to death. I don’t think I could even go through the same number of self-serving blog posts I used to read voraciously back then.
That’s mostly because I hardly have the time to do so now. It’s like reading (no kidding): the more work you need to get done, the less time you have to read. So your mind and body adjusts to speed reading, skimming the surface of what could otherwise be a mine of vibrant information, picking out the details that we think matters. This is forced efficiency due to the lack of the primal resource of time.
I’m not lamenting the loss of those blogs. I don’t want to read cryptic posts from a sad, sappy teen hinting to the possibility of a life-shattering event. That’s emo, kids. And I’m not emo. But the same goes for most of the blogs we have online today; I don’t have the patience to wade through so much information that may or may not have any bearing towards my life. If I wanted information, I’d go to Twitter, or go read a newspaper. If I needed to fan my more creative juices, I’d go read a book.
It’s like, for me, blogging’s lost something in the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0. Some folks would call it progress. I, and a bunch of my close acquaintances, would call it a soul.
Here’s a video from Kenna, one of his earliest singles, called “Hell Bent”, to end this post. I hope you enjoy.
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