Where is everybody? [UPDATED]

Does the blogosphere seem awfully quiet to anybody else besides me? Or is it just the places I hang out? My usual haunts are starting to seem downright haunted.

Of course, Mighty Middle and True Ancestor, where I stopped by more than daily, are on hiatus. PunditDrome, another site I relied on, is on what might be called technical hiatus, awaiting rebirth in a better body. The rate of posting is way down at Donklephant and Maverick Views, where Justin and Alan, young guys in the thick of life, are awfully busy in the "real world." Tom Strong, also too busy living, hasn't posted on Wheat Think in months. (Well, a month -- still an eon in feverish blogtime.) Ali at Unwilling Self-Negation is turning more and more to "real" writing and tells me I need rehab and detox too.

You could say it's summer, and everybody's playing outside. (Richard Louv, of the No Child Left Inside movement, would heartily approve.) Or you could say, perhaps accurately, that the blogosphere has peaked; that it has already shaken out, grown established, congealed, petrified, set in its ways; that many of the smaller players like us are realizing that the grooves are dug, the roads are paved, the real estate bought up, and the wild frontier on which we once would have had a roughly equal chance of staking a claim is a thing of the past.

You could say with just as much justification that the blogosphere breathes, and that one wave of fervent enthusiasm has ebbed; another is gathering, perhaps with the next crisis or controversy. It's only the commentoholics, addicted to their legions of readers' addiction to them, who can find something to rave about even in the lulls.

But above all, you could say that there are three kinds of bloggers: those for whom blogging is life, because they are successful at it; those for whom it is a small part of life, a hobby, an intermittently kept notebook or journal; and those (like me) for whom it's a substitute for life, because we are physically, emotionally, and/or professionally shut-in and thwarted. To paraphrase Red (Morgan Freeman) in "The Shawshank Redemption": Get busy living, or get busy blogging.

UPDATE: Ah, but Jack Grant is back, at Random Fate!

He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.
-Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)

Our greatest danger of losing came when we reacted out of fear.

What has been our reaction to September 11, 2001?

Fear.

In that response we have given our enemies their greatest victories. It is not for naught their tactics are called “terrorism” for their goal is to strike terror in their opponents, and we ourselves have served their ends to far greater an extent than they could have hoped in their wildest dreams.

Ahhhh. There's my fix! And the other Jack, Whelan, too -- at After the Future. (He's finally got all his great archived "Post-Secularist" essays transferred to his current URL.) See his third-way answer to the anti-immigrant nativism of Pat Buchanan and Jared Taylor (who thinks America ought to be 80% white in perpetuity):

[W]hat struck me about Buchanan and Taylor [on "Scarborough Country"] was their assumption that American cultural identity was no longer robust enough to transform immigrants into Americans, that the immigrants were going to pull America down rather than America pull the immigrants up. Buchanan [ . . . ] is clearly fearful that American identity is being lost in this massive invasion by the "Other" who he thinks are more resistant to assimilation than the European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. [ . . . ]

I'm not a multi-culturalist, but a cultural fusionist. [ . . . ] The American and global postmodern future will be an evolving story that develops primarily within the Western framework, but it will be a story of the emergence within that framework of a global fusion culture.

This does not mean only the Americanizaton of the globe, but also the globalization of America. That's what scares Buchanan and Taylor. [ . . .] Already we're seeing it in religion and spirituality, in the plastic arts, and in music. [ . . . ] The framework for the future was created by dead, white Europeans--and we are deeply in their debt--but the long-term future is not white and European. And that's ok, so long as things keep moving forward.

Comments

[Icepick]

The blogosphere has seemed to slow down lately, at least the portion I bother with. Even Althouse has had to poke the odd hornet's nest to get any action lately. (See her Murtha post, by way of example.)

Personally, I think this paragraph is spot on:

You could say with just as much justification that the blogosphere breathes, and that one wave of fervent enthusiasm has ebbed; another is gathering, perhaps with the next crisis or controversy. It's only the commentoholics, addicted to their legions of readers' addiction to them, who can find something to rave about even in the lulls.

We're just waiting for the next storm to break.

[Icepick]

And yeah, us commentoholics are having a rough go of it at the moment. Maybe you should write another post about pugs. Or Jack Whelan. Or space aliens. Or maybe a potluck post about all three?

[amba]

Pugs actually ARE space aliens . . . E.T. was obviously modeled on one.

[Jack]

Well, I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing for my weblog, but it's hard when I feel that no one is actually thinking and trying to understand instead of merely reacting. Since I don't get paid for blogging, the only payoff I get is feeling that I helped someone think about something in a new way.

[amba]

Oh! You're back!!! That helps a lot. Thank you for letting me know. (I haven't mastered this RSS stuff . . . )

[reader_iam]

Yes, to all three. It seems a lot like summer vacation to me.

I will say that many of those whom I used to see commenting frequently and regularly on various sites are very scarce or even absent. Or, they've moved to blogs that are themselves, or at least whose commenters are, more representative of one definitive side or the other.

I'm a deep, deep believer in phases and seasons, for persons, places and things, and in a perpetual, cyclical ebb and flow.

Come fall and winter, a better sense my immerge.

[meade]

My name is Meade and I am a commentoholic.
Our new 12-step program, Commenters Anonymous, meets every Tuesday at 7:00. Please join us for tea and silence.

[reader_iam]

What the heck is "immerge"? Some sort of weird hybrid of "emerge" and "immersion"? What unconscious assessment was I making with that conflation?

Heh.

Perhaps the answer in your question lies in that concept.

[Icepick]

RIA, that's iMerge, and it's Steve Jobs' latest creation. It's a device for connecting an iPod directly to one's auditory nerves. Sell any Bose stock you own now!

[Dave Schuler]

I'm still here, amba.

[michael Reynolds]

I think it's beginning to occur to people that they're not getting paid. It's unlikely that significant numbers of people will continue to engage in a demanding occupation -- and in many cases it rises to the level of an occupation -- that doesn't pay.

[amba]

Yeah. I once thought it might lead to paying gigs, back into journalism through another door. And it might, if one invested an enormous amount of time, strategy, and shrewd specialization in it. It's another speculative venture.

[amba]

Meade: Not you commentoholics. I was thinking in this instance of the commentariataholics. Michelle Malkin, e.g.

[Icepick]

Commentariataholics? That's quite different than being a commentaholic. It's like the difference in being schizoid as opposed to being schizophrenic. Neither is good, but one is much worse than the other.

(And did you know there was a Schizophrenia Daily News? The web has everything!)

[amba]

I just read somewhere about the "worldwide stuttering community."

[Icepick]

Amba, that is such a straight line! Unfortunately, all of the jokes I can think of are obvious and cruel, so I think I'll pass. Sigh.

[ŧαŋġуаρρłε]

Some of us have things to do in life outside of blogging. ;) Plus, it's true that blogging doesn't pay--but it can eat up a lot of time, and actually cost some folks money in that the overuse results in dollars shoveled out in physical therapy for tired, inflamed tendons. And, unfortunately, I tend to do my best thinking when I've away from the computer.

[ŧαŋġуаρρłε]

(typo) last sentence: I'm, not I've.