A report last month in the Economist tells us that “blogging is dying” as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: The tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.
Do a search-and-replace on “blog” and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theater, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.
Of course, none of those media is dead and neither is blogging. Instead, what’s happened is that they’ve been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.
When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they’d always belonged (they’d been squeezed on to a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the TV. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be three to eight minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.
What’s left behind at each turn isn’t less, but more: The stories we tell on the stage today are there not because they must be, but because they’re better suited to the stage than they are to any other platform we know about. This is wonderful for all concerned — the audience numbers might be smaller, but the form is much, much better.
When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else. And some of us are discovering that we weren’t bloggers after all, but blogging was good enough until something more suited to us came along.
I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I’ve done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn’t be a good fit for the blog — material I just wouldn’t have published at all before Twitter came along. However, a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blog post in years gone by and now they can live as a short thought.
For me, the great attraction of all this is that preparing material for public consumption forces me to clarify it in my own mind. I don’t really know it until I write it. Thus the more media I have at my disposal, the more ways there are for me to work out my own ideas.
“The future composts the past,” science fiction writer Bruce Sterling says.
There’s even a law to describe this — Riepl’s Law — which says new types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. “Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms.”
That was coined in 1913 by Wolfgang Riepl. It’s as true now as it was then.
‘NO SECURITY RISK’: The Railway Bureau reassured the public that the technicians’ activities were limited to technical guidance and did not involve sensitive systems The Railway Bureau yesterday said it had invited eight Chinese technicians to assist with an airport MRT construction project. The bureau issued the confirmation after an Internet user said Chinese nationals had entered the construction zone of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport’s Terminal 3 project. They asked why “individuals from an enemy state” were allowed access to such a major national infrastructure project, which raised serious concerns over Taiwan’s industrial safety, sensitive systems and information security. The bureau’s Northern Region Engineering Branch Office said subcontractor Taiwan Handle Industrial Co (台灣手把工業) of the Taoyuan airport MRT’s “Contract No. CU05 Project A14 Station Civil, MEP &
The National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology yesterday showcased its locally developed variants of the Vision 60 robotic patrol dog, which it plans to deploy on the nation’s outlying territories in the South China Sea. The variants were produced under the Joint Lab project — created by the institute and domestic companies — and assembled with domestically produced motors, lenses and artificial intelligence (AI) systems alongside licensed tech from the US, Missile and Rocket Systems Research Division deputy director Jen Kuo-kang (任國光) told the media event at a military base in Taipei’s Dazhi (大直) area. Taiwan has built up its strengths
NOT IMMEDIATE: Taiwan has a chance to appeal the proposed 10 percent tariff before it starts, while other countries face a 12.5 percent tariff from the trade office Taiwan is among 60 economies determined by the US to have failed to impose or enforce a ban on the importation of goods produced with forced labor, according to a notice released on Tuesday by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), which proposed imposing an additional 10 percent or more tariff on them. The USTR in a statement said that following an investigation, it had determined under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 that the failure of the 60 economies to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is
TIT-FOR-TAT: The US allegedly revoked the visa of a Chinese national working at Xinhua News Agency in the US in response to Beijing’s expulsion of Vivian Wang The Presidential Office yesterday condemned China for expelling a New York Times correspondent from Beijing following the newspaper’s interview with President William Lai (賴清德), saying the move highlighted Beijing’s suppression of press freedom and its threat to international news media. Taiwan has noted a series of recent incidents in which Beijing used similar tactics to “threaten and pressure international media outlets and journalists,” Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo (郭雅慧) said in a statement. “This concerns not only press freedom and freedom of expression, but also the safety of journalists, and Taiwan and relevant partners are paying close attention to the situation,” she
RSS