The Silence and the Reasons Therefore

It would be easy enough to say I’m busy and leave it at that for why the blog hasn’t been updated in over a week . That’s true enough. This has been my busiest summer yet, especially in terms of schlepping kids from one camp/lesson/playdate to the next. In addition I have some exciting writing opportunities to work on, a syllabus to complete and plenty of projects around the house.

But that’s not it, or at least not entirely. Fact is, blogging has been far less fun lately than in the past. Back in the day (“the day” in this case being c. 2006) the Ohio political leftysphere had a much different vibe. We were a community, interested in politics and hoping our people won, but also interested in building up as a whole this thing called blog. The Meet the Bloggers project provided some of the glue holding that community together, but even those who didn’t participate in MTB were part of the conversation.

That community – my community – doesn’t really exist anymore. Some members moved on, from blogging altogether or blog far less frequently. Others have moved to other areas of blogging or up the blog food chain.

Those who remain and those who have taken their place treat this thing differently. Nowadays blogging is more competitive – explicit discussions of who has better traffic or links or “influence” pop up with discomforting frequency. And the focus is not on having an ongoing conversation about how to make the world better, but on winning – both in the blogosphere and in November.
As a result, the community is gone, replaced by a club. No one ever said it was a club (at least not publicly) and no one ever said who was in and out, but without doubt the winners have chosen those who are part of the club and ignore those who are not.

At this point I should say that it is not my intention to indict people for how things have gone. What has happened is the result of choices made by people far more successful at blogging than I, and those choices are not wrong in any objective sense, they just are not the choices that I would prefer (and trust me, if I were calling people out, you would have a very specific catalogue of who’s to blame and their misdeeds.)

I also apologize if any of this sounds whiny. I’m fine with the fruits of my blogging and, given the choice, I would change little of what I’ve done here. My only intent is to explain (to those few of you who care) why this blogger has found the whole enterprise far less enjoyable and therefore hasn’t been at it lately.

And I’m feeling wistful about the community has passed. The whole community thing gets overused, but upon attending a blogger meetup last week (my first in over a year), it all came back to me how it was and how much more fun it was back then. Not that the change should be a surprise. The best human institutions only string together a few Brief Shining Moments before drifting off course, and in the electronic age, those shining moments seem ever briefer.

And yet, I’m back. A few things have happened. First off, two of my favorite commenters got into a great discussion on last week's sole post. That plus meeting old (in adjusted blog terms) friends at the meetup, plus the fairly impressive traffic numbers while I was gone, plus some real-world conversations have suggested that the Pages still exist in some tattered remnant of a community.

In addition to that, some writing opportunities are presenting themselves and the standing advice for freelancers is 1) start a blog and 2) don’t let it go out of date. Last year between teaching and the blog and my one standing writing gig, not much time remained to build the freelance business. But if I’m to be serious about freelancing, I also need to keep up the maintenance around here.

So I’m going to start showing up around here more. But my plan is to be less part of the broader Ohio leftysphere and concentrate on what this thing was at the start – a place for my personal venting and, above all else, fun. I will wade at best infrequently into the dispiriting food fight that is the national campaign. I spend less time keeping up with news and more time digging into those bits that are interesting and little discussed. Above all else, I’m more interested in generating conversations about where we are and where we need to go as a society than carrying water for any one politician or badgering you all to agree with me.

And with that, I'm back, more or less.