Return of the Blog?

Blogs have been an important part of my life over the last decade, primarily this blog and its currently dormant German predecessor. It’s been the primary way for me to share content with the wider world in a way that suits me and my communications style best. However, as the years have gone on and platforms like Facebook, YouTube and that most questionable of all platforms, TikTok, have grown in popularity, blogs have fallen out of favour. Personal blogs like mine seem to be dying out at an alarming pace, and blogging seems to be morphing more and more into a domain of sterile corporate blogs or of scammers and spammers. So you can imagine my surprise when, in early January 2023, I stumbled across an opinion piece in The Verge arguing that personal blogging should be brought back. Now, I have a lot of things to say about The Verge and its recent website design, none of them complimentary or suitable for a family blog such as this, but the story by blogger and activist Monique Judge certainly spoke to me in a way that few other opinion pieces have in recent times.

But let’s take this from the top, shall we? Personal blogs were one of the first forms of truly social media, emerging as one of the first harbingers of what would become Web 2.0 around the turn of the millennium. At their hearts, blogs were, and still are, simplified websites with an easy to use backend and a very low entry barrier. They can be either hosted on platforms such as blogger.com, like I’m doing with this blog, WordPress or LiveJournal, as well as formerly on platforms such as GeoCities, or even self-hosted. Since the platform operator literally only provides the webspace and backend, you could, and still an on the surviving platforms, write about anything you want, within the legal limits of whatever jurisdiction you happened to live in. Much of the discussion would take place in the comment section, which could spawn some interesting discussions, although in my case it seems only to attract spam bots. But even those can be easily controlled, with offending posts simply blocked and deleted. 

Blogger.com may have looked far less slick back in the 2000s than it does today, but in some ways, blogging was also easier back then!

After their heyday in the early to mid 2000s, blogs began a slow steady decline as platforms such as Facebook Instagram or YouTube began their inexorable rise. Writing a blog post simply took a lot longer than putting out a tweet, a quick Facebook post, or putting a photo up on Instagram. I myself joined the blogging fray in 2009, in German only at first, despite the fact that Germany was at the time, and in. certain aspects continues to be, a digital third world country. If I’m perfectly honest, one of the main reasons for me to start blogging was to retroactively justify the purchase of my first laptop, my beloved Acer Aspire One 110L, which I realise is coming from a position of immense privilege I was very lucky to be in. At first, my blog did pretty well, with a steady stream of posts about my travels, participation in local musical productions and my eventual emigration to Ireland. I’ve been hooked ever since and still enjoy it, mostly because I simply enjoy writing.

However, it has been obvious over the last few years that the golden age of blogs has passed. My readership numbers, occasional random peaks aside, have been on a steady downward trend. The end of blogs might very well be upon us.

That’s where the Verge piece comes in The author, Monique Judge, argues that blogs offer a type of personal expressive space that the likes of Facebook, Twitter, et.al. simply can’t provide and you know what? She’s dead right! There is a level of creative freedom available to bloggers that you just can’t get in Lord Zuckerturd’s big brother machine or Elon Musk’s nuance killer. Judge also argues, once again correctly, that blogs are really the only way, apart from dedicated websites, to be in control of your own content, especially since running your own platform gives you much greater leeway in dealing with haters, spammers, scammers and all the other tagalongs of our modern online world. This incidentally is the reason why I have comment moderation enabled on here. I get enough scammers in my comments as it is, no need to make it even easier for them.

Finally, she argues that the ongoing demise of Twitter, together with the creeping decay of platforms such as Facebook, which has long since been overrun by all types of scammers, racists and other undesirables, or Instagram, whose usual crowd of narcissists and attention seekers has long since been marginalised by content thiefs, asnd spammers flooding the platform with videos ripped from the likes of Tiktok, provides a golden opportunity to bring personal blogging back to the mainstream. Once again, it’s a point that’s tough to argue with. Make no mistake, the current crop of “classic” social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and one could argue even the likes of YouTube or Snapchat, are in a downward spiral and unlikely to recover, given the reputational damage they have taken in recent years. So yeah, there’s an opening for all of those who have a bit of a self-expression deficit.

Even with all these issues seemingly in favour of bringing blogging back to the mainstream, I cannot help but think that Ms. Judge’s take is somewhat over optimistic. Because no matter how unsuitable the current crop of social media companies may have become, no matter how shaky their long-term viability may be, the fact remains that blogs do take quite a bit of effort to set up and maintain. Okay, granted, I personally started preparing the notes for this particular post back when my Christmas decorations were still up, but even a simple post can easily take upwards of an hour to write. And that’s just if you type up your thoughts straight in your blogging platform's editor. If, like me, you need to map out and structure your thoughts first, add images or links, or prepare cover images, you can easily end up spending several man-hours per blog post.

Personally, I love sitting in a café, potentially for hours, just writing or brainstorming for my next blog post. However, a lot of people simply don't have the time for that.

And let’s be honest here, a lot of people simply don’t have the time for that. Between working one, or multiple, jobs, commuting, volunteer work, meeting with friends, family and what not, it’s often just quicker and simpler to share a quick meme, or tag one of your friends for shits & giggles. For many, social media is simply a diversion, nothing more. What’s more, the ongoing TikTokisation of social media services, with reels, shorts, or whatever seemingly everywhere, attention spans have been consistently getting shorter, and many people just don’t want to spend too much time reading something. Indeed, quite a lot of people would prefer not to read at all if possible.

Finally, there’s the thorny issue of cost. In order to really be the master of your own content, you need to be self-hosting your blog, meaning you’d have to pay for the domain and we space, let alone manage it. There are numerous services that offer hosting, domain and other services in one single package but in a time of rampant inflation and ongoing layoffs, particularly in the tech industry, money is tight and a lot of people simply aren’t willing to spend money on what for many is simply a hobby. I’m part of that demographic myself, that’s the primary reason why this blog is hosted on blogger.com. The simple fact is, and remains, that one of the primary attractions of many social media platforms is that they’re “free”, and a lot of people simply don’t care that they’re paying with their personal data.

Now I don’t want this post to be unduly negative. There is very much a place for personal blogs in today’s online landscape. There are topics that simply don’t fit into the corsets of a Facebook post, let alone a Tweet or an Instagram photo. In fact, I’d say blogs, not online video, are the ideal place to start for anyone who wants to get into long-form content creation, as literally all you need is a computer of some sort and your own thoughts. There’s a reason why blog-form content is getting more popular again, just look at the 2022 redesign of The Verge as an example of that. Finally, I can actually see the “intentionality” trend that has been gathering pace over the last few years helping in a resurgence of blogs. Because, if you think about it, blogs are the absolute antithesis of mindlessly scrolling through endless socia media feeds, as they require both attention and intention from the viewer. Oh, and from the blogger as well, naturally.

So there’s very much a place for personal blogs in today’s online landscape. And yes, a blogging renaissance is absolutely overdue. However, we should not kid ourselves in thinking that blogs will somehow supplant “classic” social media. Complement them? Certainly, and besides, the likes of Facebook, Instagram, et al are still great to promote blogs and get readers to flock to them. However, I don't think that there's a realistic chance that blogs will regain the prominence they had in the early 2000s. Don't let that discourage you. If you want to start a blog, go right ahead, the more the merrier! Oh, and let me know if you'd want me to write up some pointers on how to get started!