i've been trying to put my finger on what it is about the last few generations of blog trends that's so very alienating. at some point i started feeling like statler and waldorf in the balcony on the muppet show; like many a blogger before me, i've taken to missing The Old Internet, and get off my lawn. online shopping is now a fabulous thing, of course, and as a researcher i can hardly complain about the databases that have gone virtual, but...the blogosphere is getting a bit desolate. at some point it stopped feeling like a good party and started feeling like a bedroom with a bunch of magazine clippings taped to the wall (by a semiliterate teenager). i love a collage (and magpies), but seriously, why can't original content be the status quo? where'd everyone go, and why are the stragglers all wearing the same shirt?
i don't know that i'd care for a web with universally personal sites. i do care - quite a lot, actually - for taking a collective breather from the echo chamber of #followfriday, tumblr, flickr-as-stock-photos...you get my drift. let's stop dumping on things we're tired of seeing and mimicking things we find; let's put out.
my-damn-self monday? media fast monday? maker's monday, if you're into brown liquor? i'd like to see a day devoted to blog content that's utterly original. start the week with fresh writing and images; hold off on the links and snippets and shout-outs for a bit. tell me what you did over the weekend instead of showing me what you want to buy. if your site is topical, make it a manifesto day rather than a meta day. what if i said all the cool kids are doing it?
10 comments:
I definitely sympathize. I feel major overload when I see the same image on many, many blogs. I do subscribe to a range, some that are solely original content, some that are just fabulously curated OPC (other people's content), and some that are just a random, lovely mix. But I have to admit that lately I've had to delete a few feeds because they were starting to feel extremely redundant. I love seeing people do their own thing, whatever that thing may be. The bloggers I love just have their own sound/look. I can tell who they are when a post pops up in my reader, before I look up to see who it is. I want more of that.
Fear? I know I'm afraid of posting my own photos. But I love to see yours, and Rachel's, and all the other *original* photos. And I love to hear original voices most of all. The "Have a good weekend my dears!" and "Here's some eye candy for you" and on and on make me want to barf. (And I fall into the patter too... I. die.)
curation is a really helpful term here, rachel, and i too find it both pleasurable and useful* when it's done thoughtfully online; it's when there seems to be no agency behind the aggregation that it gets problematic.
ESB, there's prudence in that fear; i wonder sometimes if my great big cop face should be online. i don't think i'm especially nifty for using my own photos, i should note - i simply dislike illustration that isn't resonant (the "it's my birthday, my post will be that phrase and someone's random cupcake!" school of bloggery).
*as i scramble to fill a new and essentially empty apartment, i'm finding it ESPECIALLY useful.
dude, don't scramble to fill your apartment -- you know the OED is going to take up half your living room anyway.
the whole 'no sofa' thing was freaking me out for a while there. that reminds me: there will be no sofa for christmas this year. you and the other cratchits will have to share chairs with us.
also: though we bought an entire WALL UNIT, our one bookcase wouldn't fit in the elevator and had to be ditched - so we had a net gain of 3 shelves total and i STILL don't have room for the OED (and our CDs are stacked against the wall).
ESB, I read lots of blogs that don't take their own photos and it's a non issue for me, as long as they've got something else going on that I love. I only stick my photos up on my blog because I'm taking them all the time anyways and I can't get D to keep looking at all of them and you guys are a captive audience (or, if you decide to revolt, I won't know about it and therefore I won't care). Anyways, the photos you post are gorgeous and relevant,which is the key. I just hate it when a photo makes the rounds and you see it absolutely everywhere, not because it has anything to do with anything, but just because it's pretty and people seem to be afraid of posing without an image attached. Ugh.
And voice is actually more important to me than photos, although I certainly appreciate a good photo.
Lauren, don't scramble! Your apartment is going to fill up and then you're going to wonder where all your space went!
oh, um. "posing" is meant to be "posting". As in, people are afraid of putting up a post without an image attached, no matter how random and meaningless that image might be.
for the record, i'm always on the floor. but i will miss your sofa! no good, in the end?
I was just whining about this the other day, but yet, blogging seems to amount to re-posting pictures without more than a sentence of editorial commentary lately, and it is tiring, and another symptom of some kind of po-mo world in which we speak devoid of actual content. I am all for sharing, but definitely frustrated by that as a cover for redundancy.
I forgot you have the OED. Who needs to fill anything when you have all those delicious words?
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