Superb article and call to action from JA Westenberg. I always enjoy their writing.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-blogging-in-the-ruins/
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I have a lot of time for Westerburg. They seem to understand what’s going on with the “rationalists" and tech bros without falling for their bullshit.
Probably has something to do with their other jobs lol
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Great article. I’m sharing it all over.
But aside from Wikipedia, we’ve organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability.
Curious choice of exception. Without that part, this sentence would read more straightforwardly as purposeful exaggeration, but now I’m left wondering why Wikipedia alone is what gets the shoutout. A throughline with the encyclopedia, I suppose. The historical background there is actually pretty moving, by the way. I hadn’t spared much thought for it before.
[Blogs] were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages. It could be rigorously researched or entirely speculative. It could build an argument over weeks or months, with each post serving as a chapter in an ongoing intellectual project that readers could follow, critique, and respond to. […] But [the blogosphere] also produced actual intellectual communities.
Remember those?
There used to be people who generally breathe air through the nose. Remember those?
When you write a blog post, you’re creating a standalone document with a permanent URL. It exists at a specific address on the web, and that address doesn’t change based on who’s looking at it, when they’re looking at it, or what algorithm has decided they should see next. The post is there, stable, waiting for whoever wants to find it.
That’s new, by the way. The oldest blogs didn’t have those yet.
There are rote objections: nobody reads blogs anymore. The discovery mechanisms are broken. How is anyone supposed to find a new blog when they’re competing against algorithmic feeds specifically designed to capture and hold attention?
Etc, etc, etc.
But there are a few things worth noting: [search engines, RSS, newsletters]
And also bloggers linking to other bloggers, something I’m noticing a curious lack of in this case, now that you mention it.
We build it by building it. By maintaining our own spaces, linking to each other,
Can we get a for instance?
Anyway, this post is reminding me of an exchange I had the other day where someone disagreed with me about what is or isn’t a blog, and I remarked that I could probably write a whole essay on that. The thought stuck with me, but it seems like a questionable idea to actually pursue because, you know, a blogpost about definitions of blogging? I don’t think I can in good conscience ask other people to be interested in that. …But I dunno, my motivation might be swinging back the other way again, after reading this post.
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A, I would love to read your blogpost about blogging!
And B: I enjoyed the post (I read her work from time to time and generally enjoy it) with some of the same reservations here. A lot of Westenberg’s work is around pointing out problems from within some of the attention economy engines (ex YouTube, where she does a lot of shorts - and demonetized) that she’s still a part of. I think her intended audience is people who read think pieces and have some of the cognitive dissonance that business as usual is pretty fucked and don’t know exactly the path to head in (ex, a blog post with links and discovery), and she points at it without walking it fully (because she’s trying to make a living in the “creator economy” as it is harder and harder to do so).
I think pieces like this one and I Miss the Internet help more “normie” people see the cognitive dissonance between the way they are using the internet and the way they used to/could be; while exacerbating cognitive dissonance in folks like us who want to scream “yeah but it’s still here! Stop eulogizing! Participate!”
Anyways, I think she’s a helpful sign-pointer and I hope she gets more people up and blogging. I am also beginning to think it is impossible to be a income-generating member of the creator economy as a day job while participating in the personal and non-commercial web (in the ways we might like to see), so I think there will always be some tension for those walking that line. I tried to for the last four years or so until I felt so soul-sucked that I got a full-time day job even though I didn’t really need to, just so I could stop playing the “creator” game.
Some people are very particular on what is and isn’t a wiki, too. Meanwhile I’m over here finding and sharing knowledge however I can.
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Edit: forgot to mention, it was only after making my previous post that I realized this author is the same person who wrote You Will Never Win an Argument On the Internet.
@small_cypress your interpretation about writing like this as a commercial move does track with my impressions, as well, though it’s also very strange to me because my main point of reference for writing professionally is academia, and that’s a context where not citing anyone else will come across to your peers as completely unprofessional.
Would this kind of post help to get more people blogging? Perhaps, for all I know. With that said, from where I’m standing, it feels like it has some audience issues. Waxing poetic about blogging and such seems like it’d be more effective at flattering people who already see themselves as bloggers, and after all that cynicism about people on social media having no patience to read long posts… I was left wondering who this post is for, you know?
Especially given the recommendations… The landing page for Ghost outright says “Turn your audience into a business,“ so it’s clearly intended for professionals, not hobbyists just getting started with their very first post. Write.as makes a similar impression. And unfortunately I already know too much about Micro.blog to recommend Micro.blog.
But anyway, thanks for the vote of interest in the blogpost-about-blogging idea.
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Ironically enough blogger is still going, preserves all the historic blogs it hosts and is free to use, and has bring your own domain support
Not sure when this became a liability
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I am continuously surprised that Blogger is still around, because I fully expected Google to shutter it a long time ago. They have such a terrible track record with the services they host, but for some reason they’ve decided to keep this one on hand. I think that’s great, but it just feels like they’re going to pull the plug any day, you know? But I’d love to be proven wrong!
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Yeah, you can say that again. Compilations for those unfamiliar:
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I read this and I thought it was a great article! 