Down memory lane
As I get ready to start ramping up more content for my personal website, I went back through and looked at older posts that I've had here (in previous renditions of the site). It's interesting to see how the Internet and blogging in general has changed over the course of my own Internet presence. Using the "Internet Archive Way-back Machine", I was able to find my older posts from as far back as 2005.
What fascinates me more than anything is how participation in online writing has changed. In the beginning, close friends would comment quite a bit more on the entries I was writing. Over time, that tapered off as folks moved to Facebook and other social media platforms. Comments from friends got replaced with junk that I was constantly fighting until I finally shut off the comments. Then, without any interaction or proof that anyone was reading what I was writing, the desire to create content came to a halt. That has resulted in a nearly 10 year hiatus in creating content.
Instead of intentional writing - the last 10 years of my "writing" (if you can call it that) has been on social media platforms. In a way - social media is the "blogging" of today where we microblog our daily activities through tweets, check-in's and snarky comments. Interaction is now in the form of likes and shares. And, really, it's not the same. It's disposable interaction.
So how do we stay better engaged?
In a world of constant connection, we all seem rather disconnected. Our attention spans are limited by the length of our Facebook feeds and great moments in our lives are forgotten once they've gone too far down the feed. I won't pretend to have the answer this question, but I'm certainly mulling it over.
In the meantime, I'm going to resurrect those old posts. I'm going to try and find old photographs. I'm going to make new posts and new photographs. And I'm not going to worry if anyone reads it. Blogging is an online journal - and even if it's not relevant to anyone today, it will be fascinating to come back and read it 10 years from now to see how much has changed. And if I don't write it down - I won't be able to measure that change.
So, hopefully this will be the start of a new era of journaling. 10-years-from-now me better not be disappointed.