I really like blogging.
I’m not sure what that says about me, or why it’s become such a laughable pasttime, but it suits me well.
Blogging helps me scratch that zine itch. Zines are typically small scale and personal, as is this blog. I loved making (and reading) zines in the 1990s, and blogging allows me the freedom to do all the stuff I enjoyed when making zines. I can opine, and joke, and fantasize to my heart’s content. And I can point to the stuff I think is cool.
One of the things I love most is that people choose to see it. I’m not randomly popping up in some social media feed. If you are reading this post it’s because you choose to read this post, not because I’m a friend of a friend, or an acquaintance of a relative.
For me, one of the early tipping points that moved FB from fun to no fun was when people I didn’t know started chiming in on some jokey or snarky FB post of mine. I have great friends, but some of their friends are… well, they see the world differently. And if I make some off-hand comment about the horribleness of Tim Burton, I don’t need some FoaF explaining to me how many ways I’m wrong.
I started weaning myself off FB four or five years ago, and I started radically reducing my Twitter consumption in 2021. At this point I think I’m ready to let them both go. Though, I suspect I won’t completely shut down my accounts because there are people on each platform where that is the easiest way to get in touch. I’ll probably continue using them as I do now. When some link sends me there I take a minute or two to look around, and then I click away to some other page/site.
So, what I’ve learned is that I like blogging more than social media platforms. It suits my temperament better. These 100 days of blogging have allowed a new blogging habit to start taking root, and I think I’ll probably keep this up, albeit not every day. My guess is that it will end up being 3 or 4 times a week. I will think of it as my virtual, sequential online zine. Frankly, I wish more people embraced wordpress/rss. Or, maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t done a good job of keeping track. Remember blogrolls? I should probably add a blogroll.
(100 Days of Blogging: Post 092 of 100)