“A message doesn’t have to be long but it should have meaning and be passed on with passion,” writes Colin Walker (via Manton Reece), pondering bloggers as apostles, evangelists, or missionaries. “Too many words are wasted on the internet, shared just for the sake of sharing when they should be ‘sent out’ with a purpose.”
When I say that I just can’t worry about whether or not I’m being read, it doesn’t mean I don’t hope so, or that something, anything, really, that I’ve said lands with someone in some useful way. It’s just that, whatever my purpose is, whatever a potential reader’s purpose might be, I’m slowly learning to not waste too much of my cognitive or emotional capacity on the wondering about it.
So, really, in a sense, my messages in fact are “shared just for the sake of sharing”, because I simply can’t know what, if anything, happens to them after they’ve been shared. It’s all just muttering into the void, at least on platforms that eschew (whether by development priority or design) the obvious or traditional forms of reaction and response.