What about Blogging Keeps Me from Blogging

Yesterday in Facebook Killed the Feed I highlighted the way Facebook and Twitter have contributed to the decline of scholarly blogging. In truth though, those specific platforms can’t take all the blame. There are other reasons why academic bloggers have stopped blogging. There are systemic problems, like lack of time in our ever more harried and bureaucratically-burdened jobs, or online trolling, doxxing, and harassment that make having a social media presence absolutely miserable, if not life-threatening.

There are also problems with blogging itself as it exists in 2018. I want to focus on those issues briefly now. This post is deeply subjective, based purely on an inventory of my own half-articulated concerns. What about blogging keeps me from blogging?

1. Images. Instagram, Facebook, and the social media gurus have convinced us that every post needs to have an image to “engage” your audience. No image, no engagement. You don’t want to be that sad sack blogger writing with only words. Think of your SEO! So, we feel pressure to include images in our posts. But nothing squelches the mood to write more than hunting down an image. Images are a time suck. Honestly, just the thought of finding an appropriate image to match a post is enough to make me avoid writing altogether.
2. Length. I have fallen into the length trap. Maybe you have too. You know what I’m talking about. You think every post needs to be a smart 2,000 word missive. Miniature scholarly essays, like the post I wrote the other week about mazes in interaction fiction. What happened to my more playful writing, where I was essentially spitballing random ideas I had, like my plagiarism allegations against Neil Gaiman. And what about throwaway posts like my posts on suburbia or concerts? To become an active blogger again, forget about length.
3. Timing. Not the time you have or don’t have to write posts, but the time in between posts. Years ago, Dan Cohen wrote about “the tyranny of the calendar” with blogging, and it’s still true. The more time that passes in between posts, the harder it is to start up again. You feel an obligation for your comeback blog posts to have been worth the wait. What pressure! You end up waiting even longer then to write. Or worse, you write and write, dozens of mostly-done posts in your draft folder that you never publish. Like some indie band that feels the weight of the world with their sophomore effort and end up spending years in the studio. The solution is to be less like Daft Punk and more like Ryan Adams.
4. WordPress. Writing with WordPress sucks the joy out of writing. If you blog with WordPress you know what I’m talking about. WordPress’s browser composition box is a visual nightmare. Even in full screen mode it’s a bundle of distractions. WordPress’s desktop client has promise, but mine at least frequently has problems connecting to my server. I guess I’d be prepared to accept that’s just how writing online has to be, but my experience on Medium has opened my eyes. I just want to write and see my words—and only my words—on the screen. Whatever else Medium fails at, it has a damn fine editor.

Individually, there are solutions to each of these problems. But taken together—plus other sticking points I know I’m forgetting—there’s enough accumulated friction to making blogging very much a non-trivial endeavor.

It doesn’t have to be. What are your sticking points when it comes to blogging? How have you tried to overcome them?

And if you say “markdown” you’re dead to me.

Facebook Killed the Feed

There’s a movement to reclaim blogging as a vibrant, vital space in academia. Dan Cohen, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Alan Jacobs have written about their renewed efforts to have smart exchanges of ideas take place on blogs of their own. Rather than taking place on, say Twitter, where well-intentioned discussions are easily derailed by trolls, bots, or careless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or on Facebook, where Good Conversations Go to Die.

Kathleen recently put it more diplomatically:

An author might still blog, but (thanks to the post-Google-Reader decline in RSS use) ensuring that readers knew that she’d posted something required publicizing it on Twitter, and responses were far more likely to come as tweets. Even worse, readers might be inspired to share her blog post with their friends via Facebook, but any ensuing conversation about that post was entirely captured there, never reconnecting with the original post or its author. And without those connections and discussions and the energy and attention they inspired, blogs… became isolated. Slowed. Often stopped entirely.

You can’t overstate this point about the isolation of blogs. I’ve installed FreshRSS on one of my domains (thanks to Reclaim Hosting’s quick work), and it’s the first RSS reader I feel good about in years—since Google killed Google Reader. I had TinyRSS running, but the interface was so painful that I actively avoided it. With FreshRSS on my domain, I imported a list of the blogs I used to follow, pruned them (way too many have linkrotted away, proving Kathleen’s point), and added a precious few new blogs. FreshRSS is a pleasure to check a couple of times a day.

Now, if only more blogs posts showed up there. Because what people used to blog about, they now post on Facebook. I detest Facebook for a number of reasons and have gone as far as you can go without deleting your Facebook account entirely (unfriended everyone, stayed that way for six months, and then slowly built up a new friend network that is a fraction of what it used to be…but they’re all friends, family, or colleagues who I wouldn’t mind seeing a pic of my kids).

Anyway, what I want to say is, yes, Google killed off Google Reader, the most widely adopted RSS reader and the reason so many people kept up with blogs. But Facebook killed the feed.

The kind of conversations between academics that used to take place on blogs still take place, but on Facebook, where the conversations are often locked down, hard to find, and written in a distractedsocialmediamultitaskingway instead of thoughtful and deliberative. It’s the freaking worst thing ever.

You could say, Well, hey, Facebook democratized social media! Now more people than ever are posting! Setting aside the problems with Facebook that have become obvious since November 2016, I counter this with:

No. Effing. Way.

Facebook killed the feed. The feed was a metaphorical thing. I’m not talking about RSS feeds, the way blog posts could be detected and read by offsite readers. I’m talking about sustenance. What nourished critical minds. The feed. The food that fed our minds. There’s a “feed” on Facebook, but it doesn’t offer sustenance. It’s empty calories. Junk food. Junk feeds.

To prove my point I offer the following prediction. This post, which I admit is not exactly the smartest piece of writing out there about blogging, will be read by a few people who still use RSS. The one person who subscribes to my posts by email (Hi Mom!) might read it. Maybe a dozen or so people will like the tweet where I announce this post—though who knows if they actually read it. And then, when I drop a link to this post on Facebook, crickets. If I’m lucky, maybe someone sticks the ? emoji to it before liking the latest InstantPot recipe that shows up next in their “feed.”

That’s it. Junk food.