Posts
Context collapse
Posted by Graeme Lyons , Sunday, 8 January 2012 19:14
Why do people blog? For me, it's for many reasons but two things in particular. To show what I find in the natural world through the written word and the photograph and to have a laugh in the process. But almost as importantly is the need to encourage and help others on their own personal natural history quest. We all want to make a difference in our own way and this is something I have taken a lot of enjoyment from.
I know that people enjoy the blog and have benefited from it, so therefore I have fulfilled both of my major reasons for doing this in the first place. However, is my life richer for it? I think I am spending too much time on line these days, not just with Blogger but also Facebook and Twitter, not to mention all the emails. Have a look at this interesting lecture on Youtube.
The idea of 'context collapse' disturbs me. In the world of Web 2.0, we find ourselves talking to a faceless amalgamation of many different people. For me, these 'entities' are slightly different on Facebook (mostly people I know), Twitter (mostly people I don't know but share a common interest) and Blogger (anyone who cares to look at the blog). But when you talk face to face with someone, you constantly adjust what you say and how you say it for the person or audience you are speaking to. When blogging, who am I talking to? A projection of my own ideas of who is listening? Sometimes my own subconscious? The best of me? I think that spending more time on the Internet may have had a detrimental effect on the rest of my life by changing the way I communicate but I am not sure. As my life passes through different stages, I unexpectedly found my blog was capturing these changes. This was not a direct conscious decision. The feeling of living a very 'public' life has also got to me recently. It's been both good and bad for my reputation but the homogenising of my messages to friends, colleagues and strangers alike, feels wrong somehow.
I think an experiment is in order. I don't want to stop blogging or completely lose my on line presence but I definitely feel a change is needed. Firstly, I don't get many comments but I think this is due to how I write with very much a one way flow of information. I'd like to try and change this and I know that shouldn't be too hard. I intentionally kept it that way so that I didn't spend forever responding to comments. I'll try and keep the balance then by posting a little less frequently and putting more questions, quizzes and interactions into the mix.
The Internet is changing so quickly that the spellchecker in Blogger doesn't even recognise the words blog and blogging, so what chance do we stand to keep up with these changes and remain unchanged and intact?
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Hi Graeme, a very deep post there. I'm not sure how long you have been blogging ( is see this one is 2 yrs old) etc, but maybe you are reading too much into it. I have blogged since July 06 and still today have no illusions that blogging is anything other than ephemera. Some people are interested in some posts and some in others but readers change over the years after they get bored or their interests change. The only constant is me!
I like to do it, hoping for the odd comment or email that is interesting. Thats all really. Treat it like say a daily newspaper. A small thing to while away time when you would other wise be watching TV. You never know who might contact...
I hope you keep up the blogging just as you are...