Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Field Notes From the End of a Blog

When Ian Bogost was in town last November, we talked about the strange status of blogs in the expanding arena of online publishing and twitter. So I was glad to see that he recently blogged about it, in a suitably brief fashion. I agree with Ian entirely: it's not clear to me what a blog is for any more, or how to write on (or in?) one.

It even feels weird to have this massive white open screen that I'm typing in right now, and to just be writing words and sentences like this with no limit imposed.

This weird feeling is no doubt partly caused by how much I use my twitter feed these days—which isn't really that much compared to a lot of people on twitter.

But twitter infects your thought and writing process. And I think it's mostly a good kind of infection, a productive repurposing of writerly rumination and expression.

Yet it's bizarre to feel a whole platform—this blog space that for a few years felt really comfortable and useful—become an uncomfortable, undesirable, even retrograde seeming place. To feel a medium lose its vibrancy right before your eyes...