Sunday, April 10, 2011

Why I Fail to Blog

First, why I like to blog:
  1. I wanted some help when researching and writing a dissertation.
  2. There have been many other things to explore with you (hence my other blogs, and yours!)
  3. The conversations with you are fun, rich, insightful.
  4. Many of you in positive ways encourage me to blog.
  5. I've met many of you, my friends, right here or at your blogs.
Now, why I fail to blog:
  1. My family and my friends I see and hear right here are my priority.
  2. I have real-life work responsibilities and work goals that come first.
  3. The arrogance of some bloggers, the one-up-man-ship is tiring.  (David Ker joked with Peter Kirk this month to give him this advice: "Blog controversy and treat everyone like a jerk and you can be 'popular' too."  David himself it seems intentionally fails to blog much at all anymore because, as he writes in the introduction to his blog-turned-into-a-book, "and before long I was a fanatical blogger writing something almost every day, a practice which didn't change until at some point in 2010 when blogging was eclipsed by Facebook and blogging became the equivalent of shouting across a canyon and waiting for an echo that never comes."  Just to be clear, you've never left me waiting or hardly ever simply echoed what I've written here.  Hope I've not shouted either.  And to be sure, I don't think either David or Peter are the arrogant ones.  Nor are you, if you're reading this and thinking, I want to leave a comment for J. K. Gayle here, but I wonder if he's talking about me.  If you even think about interacting with me here, whether you follow through or not, how are you arrogant?  If you need me to qualify how I feel about the "arrogance of some bloggers" or to name them for you, which would be just my opinion, then drop me an email, and I'll give some kind of answer.  And hope it will be kind enough.  But do you see what I mean by tiring?)
  4. When I insist on stopping blogging, many of you my blogger friends continue our conversations and dialogues via other means such as facebook and especially email.  So why blog? except, if I don't, if we don't, then our facebook dialogues or our email conversations won't enjoy wider interactions, including more friends and new acquaintances, which I would really really miss.
  5. Sometimes one of your good comments goes to spam, and I don't see it for a while.

4 comments:

tim bulkeley said...

Besides, there's all the fun of publishing blog posts about "why I fail to blog" from time to time :)

I suspect many of the most interesting bloggers have a sort of love-hate relationship with this form of writing. It produces conversation, but it also does so in a very public way... In the "old days" there was more community and less competition in blogging. that's why I often think of stopping, but David's Facebook (still less Twitter) are not real alternatives, the media are too necessarily shallow.

J. K. Gayle said...

:) Thanks very much for your comment.

Yes, there is a depth in blogging, with the community of it, that is truly profound. Because of many interactions here, I've changed, have grown, have come to learn more and differently and positively. Some of you, many of you, have said the same to me.

Nathan Stitt said...

I don't mind the sometimes one-sided conversation that blogging entails. The biggest benefit for me is that I creating digital reference points that I can access from anywhere at any time. This works well for when I want to show pictures of things I am talking about to people. I can just go to my blog, find the post, and my ideas are already published and easy to access. The conversations are just icing on the cake.

J. K. Gayle said...

Nathan, Since the days when you were just considering possibly starting blogging to now, I've enjoyed how and what you blog!