The phenomenon is called blogfading. It’s what occurs when a previously enthusiastic blogger slowly, over time, stops posting. it happens for a number of reasons: personal drama, overwork, maybe just simple boredom. One day a blogger realizes that he or she simply has better things to do than type.
That’s what happened to me. I’ve had this domain and this blog for five years. FIVE years. I originally had the idea that It’d be an easy way to share interesting things that I found with my friends rather than emailing all of them. It wasn’t a bad idea, except for being about three years ahead of the curve and constantly having to explain what this “blog thingy” was.
I persevered, I linked, I opined and met a few nice people (some of them extremely so) but, in the end, I just… faded out. My friends asked me “You still doing your web page?” My daughter would tell me “You should blog that, you know. And you should be more personal, less linky.” I wanted to blog, but I just couldn’t think of anything to say. The opinions I had were already being blogged by persons more influential, more eloquent and more widely read than I was.
Yeah, I said it. Widely read. Because no one really ever starts a blog without thinking, somewhere in the back of their head “I’m going to BE somebody with this. People are going to listen to me and I’ll bask in the warmth of Internet stardom.” Everybody denies it and everybody is, to some extent or another, lying. Because eventually, 99% of us will realize nobody’s listening. And following hard on the heels of that realization is the thought “why am I wasting my time?” And the fading begins.
So I petered out. I always had an excuse: I’ve got to get dinner on. Working late. All these articles in my RSS reader unread. It was really more obvious but harder to admit: Nobody was listening and I was talking into the wind.
Then a funny thing happened. A couple of years ago, I heard about this next big thing: Twitter. This short internet messaging thingy. Kind of like SMS, but not really. Sorta like IM, but not exactly. Really almost a blog but, you know, tiny. I’d like to say that I signed up and the rest was unicorns and rainbows but… well…
I didn’t get it.
I mean, it didn’t make any sense at all. 140 characters to say anything meaningful? Are you kidding me? Who cares about that? And It didn’t look at it again for months, maybe a year. I couldn’t explain it to anyone so I couldn’t get anyone to use it and what was the point in having a tool to tell people what you were doing if no one was listening? It was blogfading, all over again.
Finally, with much grumbling, I got @ultranima to sign up (she was @flipgarrison in those days) and we spent our time sending goofy messages to each other. Then we got @crazygirl13 to create an account and, hey, that was kinda fun too! It was sorta like an SMS party line! Neat! I started seeing links to Twitter feeds on blogs I read and found out that Twitter was kind of a neat way to get news. Brief, immediate, to the point. I found out that some of the podcasters I listened to had Twitter feeds, so I followed them too and, boy, some of them were funny.
Now, I’d heard of Merlin Mann and tried to read his blog but let’s face it, personal productivity is a massive bag of snooze, no matter how you dress it up. But on Twitter, @hotdogsladies is this wry, slightly absurdist dark comic god with all the proper nerd flags toggled on. And he led me to others: @lonelysandwich and @scottsimpson, to name two. Suddenly this Twitter thing was starting to click for me. I still couldn’t explain it if you held a gun to my head but I knew I was starting to have fun.
Then one weekend, TJ (@tjaybee) and Flip (@ultranima) were watching The Wizard of Oz and I was idly browsing feeds in my newsreader and this snarky thought popped into my head, something to the effect of “The Wizard of Oz sure is great, but I can’t help but think that it’d be better if there were zombies.” Hardly G.B. Shaw, but it was just something that I found funny at the time.
And then the most amazing thing happened: I got an @reply from somebody I didn’t know!
@SarahWV replied, I don’t recall exactly what she said, but the effect was like lightening: an actual person was actually talking to me! I know, it sounds lame, but with an autistic child at home who gets every larger and more difficult to manage everyday, even little social contacts can mean a lot. @SarahWV is sweet and goofy and flirty and one of my favorite follows to this day. So I followed @SarahWV and through her I got to chat with @MtnLaurel and a small number of other really nice people.
And then I found out about Favrd. Oh. My. God.
Kids, Favrd is like the most addictive reality show you’ve ever seen, distilled to it’s purest and truest essence and it is good. Think of every major new Internet thing you can think of in the last ten years and then think about how long it took for the marketing types to come in and shit all over it. That, in a nutshell, was the driving impulse behind Favrd: Dean Allen put together a simple, no-frills showcase for all the very best that appears on Twitter, as chosen by Twitter users themselves. When a Twitter user registers with Favrd, it then starts paying attention to what that person likes, as indicated by their clicking a star to “favorite” a tweet. Simple, elegant, and thus far, impervious to gaming by webcocks.
And funny? Wow. The funniest shit you will read ANYWHERE on the internets, a virtual inexhaustible firehose of humor. From the moment I found Favrd, I knew I had to get on the Leaderboard. Finally, at last, this was the validation I was craving. I could do this! I would apply myself, people would see that I am someone whose opinion should bear some weight on this here Internet thingy.
As they say, on the Twitter: MASSIVE FAIL, AS USUALLY.
Well, not completely, but let’s just say Internet stardom continues to elude me. I did eventually make the Leaderboard and, while it was real thrill, it also had the feeling of “Oh great, now what?” attached to it. In the back of my head I heard this thought: “So, I just keep doing this? Coming up with new funny shit for stars?” It was only a very small voice and not that long ago, but still, it was there, this feeling that I had obsessed and stressed only to set myself up as an Internet trained seal act, and an extremely minor one at that. Clearly this was not creatively or emotionally sustainable.
And then it slowly dawned on me what it was that I’d really been looking for all this time. It wasn’t really fame, so much as it was a connection, a community.
It happened like this: A lovely lady in the UK started messaging me and we started talking about our kids. Some of you (maybe more than I know) know about The Boy and know that, while he’s not by any means a bad kid, he can be very trying. As he gets older, the reality of his situation becomes ever more stark. It is unlikely that he will ever be able to live without supervision. It is unlikely that he will ever hold a job that isn’t sheltered. I don’t know if he’ll ever get to be in love with someone and know what it is like to have that person love him in return. These things weigh on you.
This lady chatted with me about the challenges of raising her autistic child for several hours. The exhaustion, the frustration, the difficulty of maintaining a relationship, never getting to spend quality time with your partner because someone always has to be with the child. You start to develop separate social lives, in spite of being married. It’s very challenging and can leave you just bone-weary at times.
And you can’t talk about it.
Don’t get me wrong, you can talk about it, but no one, and I mean, no one, understands. They cluck and they nod and offer soothing pleasantries like “God never gives you anything you can’t handle,” or “I certainly couldn’t do what you do, you have such strength.” Look, I’m nothing special, folks, and it’s awkward and uncomfortable when people insist that I am just because life handed me The Boy fifteen years ago. So on the occasions when you can talk to someone who’s been there, it’s a relief. It’s not that you want answers or advice, but sometimes you just need to be able to lay down the burden for a little while.
So I got to do that and it was comforting. A nice change, to be able to complain and be understood without someone trying to fix what isn’t really broken. Because while I can’t speak for other parents, that’s my reality: it’s difficult but not broken. It just is what it is.
So this evening with some of these thoughts in mind, I followed a link to the blog owned by the lady in the UK to whom I had been speaking just to get a little better feel of her as a person. And I came across a small vignette between her and another person I follow that touched me.
What struck me was her response. Again, I don’t understand the whole story but I was struck by the emotion of the original post and her simple, heartfelt response. And that was when it started to feel like maybe there was something here, that maybe social networking really can be social and not just another way to exploit connections for a buck. I like that idea.
I don’t know. It’s 1:00 am and I’m tired so maybe I’m just being maudlin and maybe I’m not making much sense but I do know this: I’m writing something again, for the first time in a long, long, while. And it feels good.
Maybe that’s enough.
Reposted with edits to remove links and references—Wood.
@wood – great post. Intelligent and eloquent, especially for 1 am in the morning.
Like you I have suffered from blog fade, and it’s sad, because writing is my other big thing and I’ve been a little lost since it -all- dried up. But twitter and people like you and the other famous and not so famous tweeters/twitterers that I follow have managed two things:
you have got me thinking about words, and sentences and stories once again
you have re-awakened my sense of community, which had been tied to a brick and dropped in the river by the continual pressure of work and study and the miasma of interfering quibbling life
Thank you for the insight. Great post, once again.