Create Less Content More Often.
Before the age of constant superconnectivity, before the rise of online content distribution services, and before the malaise of exponentially decaying volume of originally-produced micromedia, (writing begets blogging, blogging begets tweeting, tweeting begets retweeting) those of us who so proudly, haughtily, or in the case of Your Humble Narrator, begrudgingly wear the red badge of "blogger" in to-day's post-postmodern world would have once been called by the archaic term "writer."
In those hoary days, these were your publishing tools:
Like a number of other irrational human activities like body modification, dietary lifestyle, or sexual inclinations, every writer writes for different reasons. Some write to plumb the depths of their soul and don't care if their work finds an audience or not, some harness their talent to expand the greater overall knowledge of the world, and others churn out volume after volume like assembly lines to feed an ever-hungry demographic. The online writer is a queer sort when it comes to their motivation; they can just as easily "blog" privately and offline, but the lure and ease of online self-publishing is often too great an opportunity to spurn. On the other hand, five fingers; yo don't have to wait for the reviews to come out in order to receive feedback on your work, comments and forums allow instant gratification; the writer also has the freedom to respond just as quickly, update their existing pieces, and move directly into creating new additional content. Blogging, in the most optimistic terms, is a just-add-water community; at worst, it's a hive mind that encourages conformity, mob rule, and anonymous braggadocio.
As the appeal of instant gratification for one's work becomes more and more widespread across the online world, the need for it grows more and more necessary for the content-makers; as feedback, good or bad, still acts as a validator for one's actions. You blog, you get comments, you blog some more. You get more readers, you blog some more, you get more comments. But if the law of diminishing returns is still applicable, it makes sense that the output of any given amateur content-maker would begin to drop off, while at the same time the frequency of updates would start to rise. Now, instead of essay-size posts on a daily or weekly basis, we now have bite-sized entries appearing several times a day.
Compare this behavior to the old anti-drug campaign: "I blog so I can get comments, so I can blog more often, so I can get more comments, so I can blog more often..." etc., etc.
What struck Your Humble Narrator most after unearthing the above tomes and paging through them was, (after the simultaneous shock-and-awe effect of nostalgia and depression, that is) the pattern just described is not a new phenomenon, and certainly not one unique to online content publishing. From 1987 to 1990 I kept one of the relatively full-sized notebooks on hand, vandalizing them with stickers and acrylic paints, and filling them with a mix of prose and stream-of-consciousness notetaking. After 1990, something queer happened with my output; perhaps it was because I was saving my storywriting to the family Apple IIe, but what went down in the notebooks (which had already started to shrink marginally in size) was less connected, more abstract, like a random mixtape of thoughts. I'd fill several pages with my own particular brand of bad poetry, (I used a lot of parentheses and a bastardized e.e. cummings style) and as the 90s continued, I was producing less and less volume at each sitting, but still writing constantly, on and off all day. By the time I was working at the local college radio station, I had graduated/downgraded to skinny reporter's notebooks, smaller in width, and the writing continued to shrink, while production remained as high and manic as ever.
At the time, you never realize what you're doing. It takes a revelatory act of retroactive continuity for things to become clear. I was tweeting. I was micro-blogging. It was isolated and private and offline, but I was already creating content.
But, like vinyl records and cassettes fall away to digital files, so do paper journals submit to electronic documentation. But since we exist in an age where society continues to straddle the fence between nostalgia and futurism, all formats of recording life experiences are still considered legitimate. The old-school ways don't die off easily or quickly, and when they do, we'll wonder simultaneously where they went and why we held on to them for so long.
Still, in a neo-futuristic age, with a population crippled by overstimulation and hobbled by divergent technologies, whither content?
⎋
In those hoary days, these were your publishing tools:
Like a number of other irrational human activities like body modification, dietary lifestyle, or sexual inclinations, every writer writes for different reasons. Some write to plumb the depths of their soul and don't care if their work finds an audience or not, some harness their talent to expand the greater overall knowledge of the world, and others churn out volume after volume like assembly lines to feed an ever-hungry demographic. The online writer is a queer sort when it comes to their motivation; they can just as easily "blog" privately and offline, but the lure and ease of online self-publishing is often too great an opportunity to spurn. On the other hand, five fingers; yo don't have to wait for the reviews to come out in order to receive feedback on your work, comments and forums allow instant gratification; the writer also has the freedom to respond just as quickly, update their existing pieces, and move directly into creating new additional content. Blogging, in the most optimistic terms, is a just-add-water community; at worst, it's a hive mind that encourages conformity, mob rule, and anonymous braggadocio.
As the appeal of instant gratification for one's work becomes more and more widespread across the online world, the need for it grows more and more necessary for the content-makers; as feedback, good or bad, still acts as a validator for one's actions. You blog, you get comments, you blog some more. You get more readers, you blog some more, you get more comments. But if the law of diminishing returns is still applicable, it makes sense that the output of any given amateur content-maker would begin to drop off, while at the same time the frequency of updates would start to rise. Now, instead of essay-size posts on a daily or weekly basis, we now have bite-sized entries appearing several times a day.
Compare this behavior to the old anti-drug campaign: "I blog so I can get comments, so I can blog more often, so I can get more comments, so I can blog more often..." etc., etc.
What struck Your Humble Narrator most after unearthing the above tomes and paging through them was, (after the simultaneous shock-and-awe effect of nostalgia and depression, that is) the pattern just described is not a new phenomenon, and certainly not one unique to online content publishing. From 1987 to 1990 I kept one of the relatively full-sized notebooks on hand, vandalizing them with stickers and acrylic paints, and filling them with a mix of prose and stream-of-consciousness notetaking. After 1990, something queer happened with my output; perhaps it was because I was saving my storywriting to the family Apple IIe, but what went down in the notebooks (which had already started to shrink marginally in size) was less connected, more abstract, like a random mixtape of thoughts. I'd fill several pages with my own particular brand of bad poetry, (I used a lot of parentheses and a bastardized e.e. cummings style) and as the 90s continued, I was producing less and less volume at each sitting, but still writing constantly, on and off all day. By the time I was working at the local college radio station, I had graduated/downgraded to skinny reporter's notebooks, smaller in width, and the writing continued to shrink, while production remained as high and manic as ever.
At the time, you never realize what you're doing. It takes a revelatory act of retroactive continuity for things to become clear. I was tweeting. I was micro-blogging. It was isolated and private and offline, but I was already creating content.
But, like vinyl records and cassettes fall away to digital files, so do paper journals submit to electronic documentation. But since we exist in an age where society continues to straddle the fence between nostalgia and futurism, all formats of recording life experiences are still considered legitimate. The old-school ways don't die off easily or quickly, and when they do, we'll wonder simultaneously where they went and why we held on to them for so long.
Still, in a neo-futuristic age, with a population crippled by overstimulation and hobbled by divergent technologies, whither content?
⎋