Blogging is so 2008
Users are finding other ways to overshare as the medium grows up and sells out
Chandler Levack
When 27-year-old Brooklyn blogger Emily Gould published her 8,000-word feature in the New York Times Magazine last May on how oversharing ruined her life, including a cover photo of her reclining coquettishly on her bed, it sparked an online debate so furious the Times had to close their message board. Curiously, the biggest accusation seemed to be that the Times had highlighted Gould at all. "I couldn't even bear to finish reading your blog (yes, it is a blog, not an article)," wrote one commenter. Asked another: "Do you think that as the Internet grows up a bit, people will really start to say 'Boy that didn't work' and change the medium?"
What happened to blogging? In its first years, shortly after the turn of the millennium, it was poised to take over the world, ready to slay newspapers, political consultants and columnists, and was declared the word of the year in 2004 by U.S. dictonary publisher Merriam-Webster. Bloggers were going to have book deals, talk shows, and make multi-millions by cutting out the media middlemen.
But today, big-business blogging has replaced the personal, idiosyncratic blog that made the medium seem so revolutionary in the first place. Maybe it's the mimicking by behemoths like the Globe and Mail and CNN, who've simply added blogs to their traditional websites. Or perhaps the blogosphere simply lost patience for the confessional first-person narrative: Julia Allison, a pushy social climber with a knack for self-promotion, became an Internet sensation through blogging her every insufferable thought (and eventually landed on the cover of Wired magazine). But Allison has lately suffered a backlash caused in large part by simple overexposure. Personally, the idea of sharing my thoughts and feelings with the cold, anonymous, and frequently hostile Internet-at-large feels impersonal in an age of information overload. And so, writers like me are gravitating to social networking sites where we know we'll be read-by people we already know.
Since 2006, I've blogged semi-regularly about things I've been mulling: hipster Palestinian scarves; the purposelessness of my liberal arts education; the late rapper Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die. But unlike many bloggers, I don't have my own website — I publish on Facebook. In turn, the people on my friends list ("friends" admittedly being a bit of a misnomer, at more than 1,000) have become my subscribers, commenting as many as 40 times per post.
This system, a fad both Wired and The Economist predict as a rising trend in blogging, has advantages compared to the traditional blogs of yore. My Facebook notes will never reach an audience larger than my friends list, but perhaps as a novice blogger that's all I need. By writing on Facebook, I don't have to deal with anonymous hecklers and obnoxious ads, or worry about my site traffic. I can simply write and be read by an audience I know well. There's an intoxicating immediacy to this tiny medium that I've never found replicated elsewhere. Though Facebook has plenty of other uses, many of which I don't want or need, I like using it as a blog because my writing stays within the boundaries I set, instead of vanishing into the Internet ether.
The larger question, of course is: Why blog at all anymore? Today's Internet users communicate via dozens of channels (blog posts, comments, emails, text messages, AIM, MSN, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku, Yammer, and hundreds more you've never heard of — don't worry, you're not missing much) so that these little communiqués trickle in like rainwater each minute of the day. Yet rarely do we have something important to say. That's the real difference between Emily Gould and the millions of faceless bloggers out there who no one reads: Gould, for all her narcissism and oversharing, crafts a compelling narrative that people love reading. And so I told Craig that there are worse people to emulate than Emily Gould when it comes to politicizing the personal. After all, I could be Julia Allison.
