Superman keeps bugging me to update my blog. My response? I have nothing to say. I do have things to say, but apparently, my attention span has shrunk to the size of a pea. Or, more accurately, has shrunk to the one-liners that Facebook and Twitter have made so very, very popular. And everyone else's attention spans seem also to have shrunk, so that I don't read blogs anymore--instead, I look at my friends' status updates on Facebook. Beth's son locked her out of the house for an hour. Erin is doing too many things at once. These are all the beginnings of great stories--how many of us took creative writing and were told that if we could come up with a great first sentence, the rest would follow? And the stories often unfold through comments--someone sympathizes with Beth and shares the story of when the same thing happened to her. Someone asks Erin more about what she's doing, and she elaborates. It's interactive storytelling this time, instead of this blog business, where you have to actually read whole paragraphs--several of them!
I won't lie and say that I don't miss the days when my dating blog had a following, and I still follow certain writers. But it seems like many of us have abandoned our regular writing activities for other forms of sharing. I don't think it's a good thing, to be honest. I think we're stunting our creativity and becoming boring. My Facebook self is pretty vanilla. My blogger self was a little sassier, and my dating column self...well, she was fierce.
You can only get a sense of a writer's "voice" if you have time to actually experience that voice. One-sentence updates do not cut it, unless you're already fairly familiar with his/her style.
Blogs will be back--we've been writing journals and letters for centuries, right? I'm not sure about the fate of Facebook--it has some cool technical aspects that I believe are the reason it's going strong now, but it's a privacy-issues disaster, and frankly, the web design leaves much to be desired. Plus remember Friendster? That seemed pretty cool, too, and then it just wasn't anymore. Twitter is going to be even more of a flash in the pan, mark my words. Sure, call me a curmudgeon, but let's just check it out in a few years and see what's going on.
Don't even get me started on the ability to completely ignore all rules of grammar on Facebook, too. I increasingly get emails from people that read like they're text messages. I can't help it...I judge them. Am I going to announce it on Facebook? Nope. But every time I find myself not capitalizing, I have to rein myself in. Standards, Ms. Beman, standards! You used to rant about this to students; walk your own talk!
And that's really all I have to say today.
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2 comments:
Very Wise! If it helps at all, I was so excited to see you had posted again. I always enjoy reading your blog. :) For some reason facebook doesn't tell me about your one line status updates. I may need to see if we can change that. I'm a facebook addict, but I'm also hoping that blogging and facebook can coexist.
P.S. I now have email on my phone which is great, err except I write emails like text messages because I have no time and the keyboard is slow. I wonder if the "This was sent from my google phone" should be changed to "Please pardon my grammar, this was sent from a google phone."
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