I remember those days.
I used to torment everyone I knew who could blog, to blog. I have been even called a bully, in that sense. About three years ago. Now, I cajole, very rarely, not to friends, however.
But blogging, as we knew it then, doesn’t really exist. It’s called publishing now. It is called publishing now because we only transmit on to a medium that has expanded enormously. And we transmit at a very high frequency. And, perhaps, because we transmit with such high frequency, we transmit in very small amounts. We micro-blog, we update statuses. In essence, we publish. We publish without context and we publish with mistakes. We publish abstract and we use SMSese (Text-speak for those outside India).
If the blog dies, does the blogger die with it? Are their lives interdependent? I don’t think so. Bloggers immigrate. They become law-abiding citizens of another world, where their ambitions and skills can be put to some use. And the blog had to die. Anything that is difficult is easily overcome by that which is simple. That is the truth by which this world has evolved.
But simple and trivial aren’t the same things. But now, they are often mistaken for one and the same. I have a list of an A-list of bloggers on my RSS feed, which over a period has become the folder with least number of bloggers. And like Paul Simon said, it applies to this list:
Some have died
Some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there
I made a very strong case (read excuse) of a writers’ block today to a friend and a fellow-blogger. I was reminded, creatively, that there isn’t such a thing – she asked – which other profession has a block?
It was interesting to think about that. A policemen’s’ block. Or perhaps a soldiers’ block. It would be real fun for the kids if they experienced a teachers’ block. A pilots’ block would be real dangerous. You get the point. It all really boils down to impatience. We deny context to what we write, we wring the entire message to a limit of characters; play to a comment and like count; post a photo to substitute a thousand words; and enslave ourselves to URL shortening statistics.
And, continuing with Paul’s Obvious Child:
Well I’m accustomed to a smoother ride
Maybe I’m a dog that’s lost his bite
The blog is dead, long live the blog.
Gaizabonts 