Now We Are Ten; or, Decline and Fall
Oh yeah, I have a blog. I forget sometimes. And two days ago it was this blog’s tenth anniversary — I forgot that too, until this afternoon. Not surprising, considering how infrequently I show up here these days, but ’twasn’t always so. Here’s a quick and scrappy graph depicting the plummet in the number of blog posts per annum, with the final point, weakly hovering just above zero, representing 2012:
I have no moral to draw from this pattern of hills, valleys, and plateaus, no autobiographical insights, apart from the obvious ones: I’ve grown busier (or “busier”) as I’ve grown older; and as online media proliferate, I’ve felt more and more ambivalent about using this particular medium to share personal “observations, discoveries, complaints, questions, obsessions.” (That’s what Twitter’s for, right?)
The graph does suggest when that ambivalence set in — about five years ago, which is roughly when I removed the blog’s traffic counter. I decided I didn’t really want to know how many people were reading it, and I’d henceforth treat the blog as a kind of semi-public scratchpad or commonplace book. And the past couple of years I’ve been keeping an actual daily (or near-daily) notebook, genuinely private, where I keep track of what’s going through my head with ink and paper. I suspect that’s where my blog “went”: into an older medium, one which feels more durable, one in which (I convince myself) I can think more “clearly,” whatever that means.
Or I could sum up my tenth anniversary thoughts like this:
Oh yeah, I have a blog. I forget sometimes. And two days ago it was this blog’s tenth anniversary — I forgot that too, until this afternoon. Not surprising, considering how infrequently I show up here these days, but ’twasn’t always so. Here’s a quick and scrappy graph depicting the plummet in the number of blog posts per annum, with the final point, weakly hovering just above zero, representing 2012:
I have no moral to draw from this pattern of hills, valleys, and plateaus, no autobiographical insights, apart from the obvious ones: I’ve grown busier (or “busier”) as I’ve grown older; and as online media proliferate, I’ve felt more and more ambivalent about using this particular medium to share personal “observations, discoveries, complaints, questions, obsessions.” (That’s what Twitter’s for, right?)
The graph does suggest when that ambivalence set in — about five years ago, which is roughly when I removed the blog’s traffic counter. I decided I didn’t really want to know how many people were reading it, and I’d henceforth treat the blog as a kind of semi-public scratchpad or commonplace book. And the past couple of years I’ve been keeping an actual daily (or near-daily) notebook, genuinely private, where I keep track of what’s going through my head with ink and paper. I suspect that’s where my blog “went”: into an older medium, one which feels more durable, one in which (I convince myself) I can think more “clearly,” whatever that means.
•••
Or I could sum up my tenth anniversary thoughts like this:
