One thing I question about this Richard MacManus history lesson about online writing is that while the technology arc described obviously is correct, I wonder if we have any data to suggest that the people using social platforms otherwise would have been blogging.
But of course, times change. And blogging isn’t the center of the online media ecosystem any more. Nor, as it happens, is long-form writing. The proverbial – and literal in the case of Facebook – writing was on the wall when social media began to ramp up from about 2009 on. Services like Facebook and Twitter favored much shorter, attention-grabbing content. Then over the 2010s, multimedia formats began to predominate on these platforms – leading to GIF-heavy video and image apps like Instagram and TikTok.
MacManus doesn’t actually suggest this, but I feel like its the implicit undercurrent of many discussions about how things have changed in these regards since the beginning of the century.
I understand the irony in that my own blogging avocation mostly came to an end just as first social networking and then later social media sites took hold, but my gut instinct there is that the timing for me mostly was coincidental, in that post-Portland Communique in many ways I was burned out on the idea of Writing A Lot, and from there on out my sporadic blogging tended to center around specific interests, most of which had a short half-life.
Did you blog back in the day and then not so much blog anymore when Friendster and MySpace and then Facebook and Twitter came along? Did you never blog? Did you blog and keep blogging the entire time?