on length and depth
As I was about to post to my various “status dumps” today, I noticed that I have become mired in my own narrow-minded view of what this website should contain. For example, I have no problem with Twittering two sentences about my crappy day, or tossing up a short vignette on my tumblelog, yet I won’t put anything here for a month and a half.
Why is that? Why do I view this place as some sort of sanctuary while the others receive my most scurrilous thoughts?
Ten years ago, when I started my online journal, the shorter-format tools did not exist. Everything I published on the Web was in essay format, and perhaps my writing was at its highest quality then. In 2000, when I discovered LiveJournal, I was much more comfortable with the immediate, shorter bursts of less-than-prose; most of my online friends were congregating there and participating in multiple conversations at once, so I had to be faster than usual to be a part of it.
That format became too participation-focused for me, and so I withdrew to my own domain, literally and figuratively, where my plodding pace and tone were old standards. I am intrigued from time to time by services like Twitter and Plurk, which make virtual soapboxes even tinier and more portable, mostly because I enjoy receiving news briefs on my friends, and to some extent the status update has taken the place of the email and the instant message.
And even this, a speedy meta-post to reengage my tradition of mildly oversharing, has taken me much too long to assemble. There is too much meta in my online life, too much explanation and justification that does not exist offline, so I avoid the quagmire entirely.
There is no neat ending for this thread, but sleep will fit nicely in this pause.
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Comments
I try to blog regularly, as much as anything as some kind of abstract journal of things I find interesting (and hopefully my readers too), and to keep my readers, and indeed increase them, and yes, also as a small revenue stream.
Posted by: eyebee | June 22nd, 2008 07:59
I am in a similar situation: part of why I stopped blogging was the time investment in writing posts on a daily basis when I often just didn’t feel like it. Part of it was that it seemed like there were expectations from my LJ friends to read everything they wrote, and interact much more than I would tend to with email, IM, or other methods. Then there was the drama.
Things like twitter give me a good little self-expression outlet and a way to see people are around, but I don’t feel like there’s any real demand on me. Also, things like flickr cut right to the chase - if I take a photo I want to share, I just stick it there and don’t need to write anything about it if I don’t feel like it.
Posted by: scott | June 22nd, 2008 09:37
I’m blogging twice as often as i used to. A little of that is lowering of standards. But some of it is raising standards. What? Yes, i’d come up with an idea not for a single post, but for twenty. And i’d get excited enough about it that i’d get a week ahead. At most i post once a day… The issue with these higher quality posts, is that it’s something i know something about. That makes it esoteric. I don’t look at my stats, but i imagine that i’ve driven off most of my traffic.
Posted by: Stephen | June 22nd, 2008 15:50
Twitter is pretty limited. Still, i don’t complain that it’s 75 F unless someone says they’ve got 106 F. Oh, i went to a movie and left the windows open, and we got 6 inches of water. But half my friends live in a desert, buy water, it’s expensive. I live between the Great Lakes. They’re not just Great because they’re big.
Posted by: Stephen | June 22nd, 2008 15:53
[...] As I was about to post to my various “status dumps” today, I noticed that I have become mired in my own narrow-minded view of what this website should contain. ["on length and depth"] [...]
Posted by: cygnoir.net | January 1st, 2009 19:09