Are We All Blogged Out?

(Cross-posted from Ambiance)

It's been quite a topic on Twitter among our little loosely-defined community.  A bunch of us seem to have gone blooey all at once, as if responding helplessly to some shift in the heavens, or in the collective unconscious.  The cultural wavefront has moved on, but whither?  Twitter feels transitional, somehow.  But blogging just seems to have peaked and ebbed . . . to have reached a saturation point, or point of diminishing returns.  Maybe after several years of emptying out our minds daily (like chamber pots?) a lot of us are running out of things to say, or feel in danger of repeating ourselves.  Maybe, with the exception of those blogs that have broken through -- become established institutions in their niches, sustained by massive rewards, expectations, and inertial momentum -- a lot of us just couldn't keep up the effort any longer.  Myself, I felt right on the borderline between private and public:  blogging was no longer something I was doing just for myself, and so there was guilt and sorrow involved in (mostly) quitting.  But I plum ran out of gas.  (A gasbag without gas?)

It's interesting to ponder Ann Althouse's role in all this.  As the sort of leader of this particular pack, did she issue the cue we're all following, or was she just an early responder to something larger?  I suspect the latter, even though it feels to a lot of us as if the sun has deserted its faithful planets and run off to join a twin star.  Oh, she's still blogging, but you get the sense that her heart, quite understandably, isn't in it to nearly the same extent.  And so it is for many of us in miniature:  "real life," and even "real writing," calls.

Of course there's an element of pure practicality, of energetic economy, to it all.  Are you getting enough calories out to keep putting them in?  I was amused to read, yesterday, "Is Blogging Keeping You Poor?

We drive ourselves to creative exhaustion by expecting ourselves to pump out a never-ending stream of remarkable content — a stream that, even in the best of cases, only pulls in a couple hundred bucks a month in advertising revenue. . . .

To say we are overworked and underpaid is an understatement. . . .

[C]reative energy is a finite resource. You can probably summon enough to write a few quality posts, but once you’ve done that, there’s no creative energy left for anything else. It doesn’t matter how hard you push yourself. When you’re out, you’re out.

This character goes on to say the solution is working less and "monetizing" more, but that's not what most of us want.  To be blunt, we -- at least the "we" who write, have written, or aspire to write and be sustained by it -- want to work just as hard, or joyously harder, and get paid for it.  A friend of mine who did women's-magazine writing and editing for years, and wrote three amazing, groundbreaking books -- all of them probably just a little too subtle and unsettling to be smash hits -- is now writing online in the same vein, and being expected by major commercial women's websites to be grateful for the opportunity to provide content for free.  "I used to get paid for this," she said to me recently in a dazed and rueful "What happened??" tone.  The Web is full of writers who never quite broke through "in real life" and have failed to break through here too, in the sense of making a living wage.  Obviously, it's our "fault" -- we haven't hit a major nerve,  we haven't built a "platform," we have neither wakefully figured out how to exploit ourselves nor obliviously embodied the spirit of the age, which are the two roads to having a name that pulls its weight.  We're "minor" and we're proud.  And tired.

It's sad, though.  It's the end of a mini-era that's lasted five years or so.  Where now?  We have to follow where the piper leads.  It's interesting to me to watch what we're talking about here when we're talking at all.  It's mostly the economy, stupid, with a minor in my obsessive theme of science and religion.  It's interesting to become aware of the extent to which blogging has been a political medium.  The death of blogging, at least in its familiar voice and form, is linked to a sense of the profound inadequacy of politics to address what ails us.  But politics, it turns out, was easy to talk about.  Whether you took one side or the other or spun your web between them, it provided a ready-made framework for and spur to words.  And now?  What do we take off from?  What do we react to?  We're like baby spiders floating in space with our little bits of silk, having as yet found nothing to attach them to.

Le blog est mort, vive le blog?

Comments

[Ally]

Well, I spent part of last week at an education writers (as in journalists) conference in D.C., and newsblogging is on the upswing. I think you'll continue to see an increase in the number of reporting blogs and websites, on a variety of topics. So while people's personal blogs wane, it looks to me as though professional blogs will flourish.

[amba]

Yeah, that's probably where a lot of reporting is going to go now that newspapers are dying. And a good thing too, though how people are going to get paid for it is a dicey question. Well, it will be specialized, and organizations like yours will pay for it, I guess.

[shaun]

I must say, in the gentlest of terms, that you are downright schizophrenic about this entire matter. Having read this wonderful blog for a few months now, I can reliably predict that when you do a post like this or say you've had it and are shutting down, you'll soon be back like ten cats.

I am incapable of running out of edgy and, I can only hope, interesting things to blog about.

This is because of my own background as a well-traveled, ink-stained wretch who often can find an experience in my past to stir into an experience in our present.

But more than that I had no illusions about why I got into blogging nor do I have any problem pulling back and taking a deep breath when the weight of the world gets too heavy.

I have penned about 6,500 blog posts over the years, most of them finger food but a few that took some effort and passion. My reward is that nearly half of my visitors (from nearly 140 countries and counting) stumble on me through search engines when they type in whatever interests them: "Duane Allman," "golden retrievers," "extraordinary rendition," "Nancy Pelosi is an idiot," and so on and so forth.

People who obsess on whether blogging is fading, rising or maintaining need to get lives. It's what it is and nothing more or less.

[amba]

"Finger food!" I love it.

[karen]

I just hope and pray that you don't quit completely. I've seriously had to cut back on reading-- and you are basically the only place i ~speak my mind~, yet the thought of NOT reading your brilliant words... leaves me empty in my heart.

As for your political silence- i sort of understand- but, this was such a real place to harvest honest thought... not many places are so bi-partisan... including the WH. Especially the WH.

You're correct about the address changing. I don't know when, either. Pins-n needles all around.

[Janet]

Blogs are places to have conversations. You're not obliged to continue if you don't want to. Or it can move down on the list of priorities. Just breathe deep and go where your heart takes you.

[Lynne]

I think the mistake lies in confusing blogging with a writing career, and judging the one by the standards of the other.
This is a place where I think a lot of 'pro' writers just don't 'get it.'
Blogging has given a voice to me and zillions like me who may have a talent, but never had any connections or any chance to be heard. For the first time in our intellectual lives, when our "betters" tell us to shut up, we can put up our fiesty, non-credentialled dukes and say: "You can't make me!"
And then go on adding our voices to the din that is America, whether the 'real' writers like it or not.

[amba]

Jeez, who said the "real" writers didn't like it?? Whence this hostility to people who wound up writing for a living? Was it we who told you to shut up? We were reaching out to you with our words, longing for a shout-back. Maybe your parents, or your teachers, or spouses, or publishers told you to shut up; or maybe you told yourself to shut up. Writers-by-trade certainly did not! And if you become a writer, by trade or not, more power to you!

However, I cannot unbecome what I am, and I'm talking about what blogging has been for me. Should I shut up, then?? We're coming at the experience of blogging from a different angle, very true. Does that invalidate blogging as personal expression for us? (Could we ever write and talk this way in published print?)

I shouldn't have said "we," or should have made it clearer what "we" I was talking about. Some long-term bloggers (not all writers by trade, either) have peaked and ebbed, have gotten tired. It's an observation that seems true. It doesn't mean some haven't gotten tired, or perhaps never will. Time will tell.

[Lynne]

Well, my goodness, I don't like to seem unkind, but you certainly aren't being very clear in the post. You spent the first third talking about your writer friend's problems with 'content for free' and referenced a post titled "Is blogging making you poor?" So it's not illogical for a person to get the impression you are confusing your career with your blog.
And what is all this nonsense about Ann Althouse, for Pete's sake? If Ann Althouse jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff, too? Why do you need a leader to follow? Decide what *you* want to do and just do it. If you think blogging is on it's way out and that bothers you, just stop. Then take it back up again if you change your mind.
So what?
And as far as shutting up goes, my point is that blogging has allowed all kinds of people to skip the gatekeepers altogether- editors and whatnot can now see all kinds of work that would have been unknown to them just a few years ago. Personally, I think that's all good.

[amba]

blogging has allowed all kinds of people to skip the gatekeepers altogether- editors and whatnot can now see all kinds of work that would have been unknown to them just a few years ago. Personally, I think that's all good.

I literally could not agree more.

As for Althouse, she's not a leader, she just has powerful gravitation in her area of the blogosphere. As a large body she both reflects and influences "what's going on." There are a large number of people (I'm not one) for whom her comments section is a major social and intellectual gathering place. A major change in her status is therefore a significant change in those people's lives. Coincidentally or not, around the same time she fell in love and became palpably less engrossed in blogging, I was having trouble continuing to do what felt like the same thing. The more personal or emotional dimensions of it I would only share in a private e-mail.

Anyway, I haven't stopped blogging but have shifted some of the responsibility for keeping it going (at Ambiance) to my own community of commenters, many of whom are more than my peers as writers, professional or not. This feels wonderful to me.

[joared]

I hope you aren't "all blogged out" as I enjoy periodically visiting here to read your latest topic.

I think technology will "shake down" over time. We'll each choose what type we prefer. We may will embrace the whole variety, selectively choosing to communicate using different methods based on the content we want to express, or with whom we want to have contact. Maybe it will depend on how much time at our disposal, or simply how we feel at the time.

[amba]

Dear Joared, thank you for coming by. I'm feeling guilty for having yanked the welcome mat out from under kind visitors' feet. I'm going through a change of phase, I guess. Blogging at that other place feels "new" to me and though I myself am probably just doing the same old thing (though some of my co-bloggers definitely are doing something new), I have the illusion that it's different. Humor me.

I think you make an excellent point about technology. The more different ways and media there are, the more any given individual will be able to find a good fit. I know people who swear by Facebook, and others who have found their metiér on Twitter.