Confession: Way before I quit writing on this blog last year, I quit reading blogs. I told myself I didn’t have the time to navigate what had become the overwhelming jungles of my reader. I was busy writing on my entertainment website, responding to those comments, Tweeting, Instagramming, watching Netflix and occasionally even re-blogging or updating my Facebook status.
It was no surprise, though, that I soon abandoned writing here altogether. Reading blogs and writing a blog go hand in hand, I think, and it’s kind of selfish to expect people to care what you write about when you don’t care enough to read what others have written. The end of my blog reading was soon followed by the end of writing, and for months, this place remained abandoned.
The decision to revive this corner of the Internet was equally a decision to read blogs again. I started yesterday by marking every single post in my reader as read- a fresh start. I went through my subscriptions, one my one, and what I found was a little depressing: dead blogs.
Blogs I once admired, blogs I read religiously, blogs of friends who now talk to me about the stories they would’ve once blogged. Blogs with formal ends and blogs that petered off, just as I had. My reader was something of a graveyard.
It was fitting, then, that yesterday I also came across this post: The blog is dead, long live the blog.
Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.
In that article, (and on the author’s personal blog), he makes the point that the role on the Internet once exclusively filled by blogging has been reallocated to any number of other mediums. My pictures go on Instagram, my gifs on Tumblr, my thoughts on Twitter, my rants in a vlog. Blogging gave birth to so many children, who are arguably now greater than their parents.
Does this make my undead blog a zombie?
Maybe this makes me a vampire? (Vampires are still cool, right?)
I’m not sure, but thinking about all this made me realize that I have to put up a headstone:
Rest in peace, Past Blog. I’m no longer the same girl who wrote her first post about a late teenaged rebellion. I’m not the girl who regurgitated her first heartbreak all over countless posts. The blogging landscape has changed and a lot of people I left in a place are no longer there. Goodbye past abandoned goals and I hope you are in a better place failed resolutions. I leave here the time I lost, and focus instead on what can still be recovered.