Blogging is dead. Long live the blog!

Last week I had ~~a secret meeting~~ jetted off for a short trip.

The plan was to: go, meetmeetmeet, sleep, return.

What’s not included above?

Hint: it rhymes with SLOGGING.

A touch of social media exhaustion coupled with choosing to live & not blog about life resulted in my decision to leave the laptop home.

The trip was fantastic. The trip was pretty damn enlightening. The trip wasn’t complete without my taking an hour a day to write.

I knew this about my blogging-self (Blog, why cain’t I quit you?), yet being away from the manufactured pressure of “I have to” gave me the perspective I needed to consider:

Is blogging a dead medium?

My answer remains NO.

Here’s why:

Writing is living memoir. For the reader and the writer. I blogged my way through Guatemala. I live vicariously as you blog through life events big & small. Blogs are fluid, alive and *constantly* updated. It’s the reason The Real World started and why The Truman Show was a success. We’re all naturally curious & voyeuristic. We all have stories.

Brevity doesn’t always rock. There is beauty in the terse (remember the six word memoir?) yet, when I tried to embrace microblogging, Id frequently surrender and move the conversation to Facebook. Unless you’re (not) Hemingway 140 character brevity works best for sales and pithy quotes.

Writers write. They may also Tweet, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, but mostly we write. Carefully crafted sentences. Plural. Many of them. We need it to survive as our heads are filled with words begging to be set free. I hear bloggers lament they love blogging, but loathe writing. I always encourage them to find the medium which resonates with them. I like vlogging just fine. I love the written word.

Blogging is my therapy. I don’t lifecast, but by the time I share thoughts with you (family yoga to meditation) Ive spent considerable time working through the topic at hand. My blog posts are intended as a launching pad for the (therapeutic) discussion & normalizing you share in the comments. Without one there could be no other.

A friend who works in publishing remarked:

I miss the days when blogs were lower-case b, when someone could quietly blog and if others were charmed they could read it and if not then not. Now blogs are vehicles for platforms and topics.

Initially reaction was

Wait, in order to get our books published the industry demands platforms & hooks!

My next thought, however, was:

That’s it. The charm can feel forced for page views & uniques. For the most part it seems the was blogging began, without a constant barrage of sponsored posts and ‘click to tweet’ is dead.

Now you.