Writer's block in blogland?

Norman Geras posted yesterday about a Sunday Times article documenting the alleged decline of blogging. I have to say that I, too, kind of agree, although I don't believe that blogging is going to disappear. Why is this happening? Well, there seem to have been a number of significant changes since blogging's inception almost a decade ago. First, blogging was often a means of recording links (take Kottke as an example), and this has largely been superseded now by sites like del.icio.us. Second, at the outset blogging was exciting because not many people were doing it, and there was a real chance of attracting a readership, whatever you were writing about. It was new, trendy, and subversive, and people like that kind of thing. But today, there is much more professionalisation of blogging — people earning their money through writing blogs. These sites attract large readerships and leave smaller, more personal sites looking inferior. People have got wise to what bad blogs are, and they don't read them any more. This isn't such a bad thing, I think. We have complex sites for ranking, indexing, and finding information, so there is less incentive to "surf" the net as we used to — we can go straight to information hubs and find what we're looking for much more easily now.

Third, though, there is a broadly cultural change, I think, although I may feel this because I began blogging when I was at school and (I hope) I have changed and matured substantially since those days. When the opportunity to blog first came along, I've no doubt it was a great liberation for a large number of people; I remember I used to read a blog by an anonymous gay twenty-something struggling with his sexuality in Glasgow. There was a therapeutic aspect to blogging, as well as an aesthetic one. In these people felt able to project and express themselves in a way they were unable to in real life. To generalise horrendously, I suggest we're collectively more cynical and disillusioned about this way of doing things now. Egotism is something very closely tied to self-expression, and a view of the blogger as some kind of egomaniac, who genuinely believes large swathes of the population will be interested in photos of their holidays, has become somewhat ingrained culturally, such that it is on some level the orthodox view of Those Who Blog. But something which is well written, and in which there is content of genuine interest and value to the lives of others, will always have the power to buck this trend.

In other words, I suggest there has been a shift over the last ten years, that the blogosphere has established for itself a set of aesthetics, or a standard by which to judge the quality of content. Inevitably, this will result in the falling-away of a large number of bad and poorly maintained blogs (this one, one day, you may pray), but this is surely no bad thing.

Tags: blog, weblog, quality, decline, normblog, normangeras, sundaytimes, newspaper, blogosphere, blogging, links

Labels: blogging