Blogging is maybe on the horizon of some kind of cultural moment. The Verge and Tedium (an excellent publication with excellent editorial taste) detect that, as Twitter’s twilight makes us question what’s possible with short-form content, the long-form of the blogosphere will recapture our attention.
I have mixed feelings on this. For it to come true is an objective positive (although, I swear I had decided to start this very blog prior to the New Year), but it’s hard for me as a young person to imagine something other than full-faucet media. To imagine art, rather than content.
Worth getting ahead of this early and often: I feel extremely unqualified as a trendspotter. There’s not a party alive I wasn’t late to. So I won’t even try to predict whether or not blogs will actually succeed — I hope they do — but like I said, I’m young, and it’s not something I’ve seen before. The shape of it is alien to me.
(This sort of doubles as an intro post to whatever it is I’m doing here. Hi!)
If I were to target the specific quality of blogging that feels beyond my attention, it’s this: the currency of the internet is specialization. You can’t just write, or take photos. You can’t make a YouTube channel for your Minecraft let’s plays and then post a recipe you made, and then make cultural commentary. All of those things feel very antiquarian to me, from an earlier time of social media. TikTokers bemoan that one viral joke dooms your account to forever be a retelling of that joke, changing the words slightly each time, until you are sorted into your usual obscurity.
There are fashion accounts, and there are cooking accounts. There are listicles, there are reviews, there are how-to’s. Here is the Fountain of Youth: to find one thing that you don’t mind doing forever, and do it. Forever.
Gosh, don’t think I’m bleak for saying this. I’m new to it is all. What charms me so much about a blog is that it’s a very personal space, where you don’t have to shape your ego to the peculiar demands of the machine. But because you’re not playing the machine’s game, you also don’t get the machine’s bounty: other people’s attention. Something tells me this is a feature, not a bug. You may not get to be a household name, but you can be a “Kansas City Star.”
I made an account on Substack the other day, anyway. You know, the one thing I really consider myself an expert in is D&D, so maybe I’ll write about that. I love reviews as a format. First thing, I should probably figure out how to make a good intro post to a blog. Scratch this one.