i feel i've drifted away from my former life as a solid netizen, to one that's more present in my real world surroundings. i'm more involved in my local community, i do more activities in my area, rather than just partaking of them online. in general, i find myself living a life that's less isolated, more grounded in my surroundings and far more properly dressed than it was. and i'm spending a whole lot less time online. i think it's made me less in touch with the culture of the blogosphere than i was, but perhaps i just feel less of that culture than i did.
but that culture is also changing. ironically, there are more blogs than ever, but i think people read them less. we read in a different way than we did just a couple of years ago. we read on devices, on the go, rather than sitting in front of our laptops. this means we leave less comments. as much as i adore my iPhone and iPad, i'm not THAT fond of typing anything of any substance on them (and odin knows that all of my comments are full of substance). we might ponder just as much an interesting post we've read, but we don't necessarily let the writer know that we were there. and it might not even show that we were, thanks to various readers and such.
i think blogging has changed, even for me. i'm less driven to share every thought (which largely has to do with the aforementioned, undoubtedly). but it's also because i share those snippets i once shared here in other ways (e.g. on facebook and instagram and less so, via twitter). and all of the pretty things i find, i pin now on pinterest instead of linking and pondering here (come to think of that, i kind of miss the old way - pinterest is actually rather impersonal in many ways).
flickr (with which i've always had a love-hate relationship) is largely over for me as a social network. i don't even bother to add my photos to groups anymore (i'm not even really sure when it stopped). it's really just a place in the cloud to park and categorize my photos and a place from which to retrieve my instagram photos for blog posts without actually plugging my phone into iPhoto (tho' that may be solved by iOS6, i've yet to fully explore it, but i've heard there's now iPhoto on the phone).
i guess what i mean by all of this is that i've moved back towards flesh & blood real life. and i think i miss the matrix a little bit, even as i am slightly relieved to be more present where i am here and now.
how do you think the blogosphere has changed in recent years?
1 comment:
I thinks this is happening to most bloggers who don't do it professionally. I certainly use twitter, instagram and my blog as three parts of the same thing, and have been spending much more time with people in person. While I lived away from family and friends, social media was so valuable. It still is, but it doesn't need to be quite so all the time.
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