Most of my facebook contacts and all of my Blogger contacts are great people from our Y360 days - and they are also great writers. These days, a blog will trickle in once in a while… a precious rarity in what was a wealth of prolific creativity. Journals, poems, rants, humor, everyday occurrences from the absurd to the sublime; from the profound to the profane… it was wonderful. I am just as guilty. Even during the busiest of times, I would post at least once a week. Now I go for weeks with nothing to say (well, nothing I am willing to commit to posting). What happened? I have a theory.
Email killed letter writing. Texting killed grammar, vocabulary, and spelling skills. Now facebook has killed blogging. It is an easy distraction from real writing. What used to be a crafted piece of work has been reduced to “Thom is…” then fill in the blank. Quick comments (except for Rob : )), silly quizzes, planting gardens, poking, super poking, sucking lollipops… etc, etc, etc. I am not saying that I don’t enjoy it. I certainly participate in it. But the time I spend doing this would be better spent writing again. Again, I have a theory about why we do this.
Many of us started out on a social networking site (Y360) that, at the center, was the blog. Said social networking site went belly up. We scattered to the four cyber winds. Some continued writing on other sites, like Multiply, Blogger, My(wasted)Space, created independent blogs, or are stubbornly holding out hope that Y360 will rise from the ashes like a virtual phoenix (don’t hold your breath). But we were never able to recreate what we had on Y360. Recently, one by one, we rediscovered each other on facebook – and I am very happy about that. Many of us also pulled in people from our past who we thought were lost to time. Wonderful! I have very happily reconnected with people I never thought I would encounter again. It is obvious that we are social creatures and we love the contact, we love to see what is happening in each other’s lives, or just have something as basic as a gauge on a friend’s mood – we were jonesing and we found our social networking fix.
But what of the real writing? We text, we Twitter, and we allow facebook to eat our blogging time. Facebook is like cocaine – you do a line, you feel good, then you do another and another and another and before you know it you are up half the night thinking something really cool has happened. I used to compose and record music this way… the next day, I would listen to what I did and it was usually pure crap.
I am glad that we have all reconnected. I thoroughly enjoy the interaction, the jokes, the flirtation, and yes, even the lollipop sucking.
But I really miss reading your wonderful blogs.
Email killed letter writing. Texting killed grammar, vocabulary, and spelling skills. Now facebook has killed blogging. It is an easy distraction from real writing. What used to be a crafted piece of work has been reduced to “Thom is…” then fill in the blank. Quick comments (except for Rob : )), silly quizzes, planting gardens, poking, super poking, sucking lollipops… etc, etc, etc. I am not saying that I don’t enjoy it. I certainly participate in it. But the time I spend doing this would be better spent writing again. Again, I have a theory about why we do this.
Many of us started out on a social networking site (Y360) that, at the center, was the blog. Said social networking site went belly up. We scattered to the four cyber winds. Some continued writing on other sites, like Multiply, Blogger, My(wasted)Space, created independent blogs, or are stubbornly holding out hope that Y360 will rise from the ashes like a virtual phoenix (don’t hold your breath). But we were never able to recreate what we had on Y360. Recently, one by one, we rediscovered each other on facebook – and I am very happy about that. Many of us also pulled in people from our past who we thought were lost to time. Wonderful! I have very happily reconnected with people I never thought I would encounter again. It is obvious that we are social creatures and we love the contact, we love to see what is happening in each other’s lives, or just have something as basic as a gauge on a friend’s mood – we were jonesing and we found our social networking fix.
But what of the real writing? We text, we Twitter, and we allow facebook to eat our blogging time. Facebook is like cocaine – you do a line, you feel good, then you do another and another and another and before you know it you are up half the night thinking something really cool has happened. I used to compose and record music this way… the next day, I would listen to what I did and it was usually pure crap.
I am glad that we have all reconnected. I thoroughly enjoy the interaction, the jokes, the flirtation, and yes, even the lollipop sucking.
But I really miss reading your wonderful blogs.
