Sometimes, it is weird to reflect on how things stood back on August 25, 2004 when I created this blog. As I said numerous anniversaries before, this blog was intended to be an outreach/supplement to the Other Fantasy section of wotmania (which went defunct in September 2009; its "successor" site, Read and Find Out, recently announced it too is about to shutter its virtual doors after seven years). But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum and...
Yeah, a lot has changed since a barely 30 year-old me established this. I've seen the rise and fall of many individual blogs and the spread of that bligh...err, social media that links divers groups of people together. Twitter, podcasts, Tumblr, Reddit...none of that really existed in 2004, at least not in a mass consumption form. I don't begrudge people who communicate via those formats, but I will admit, while I pause to tell some kids to get off my lawn, that I think something has been lost in the change.
Granted, blogs themselves were rapid-response, "hot take" vehicles as well, where each blogger could (and did) quickly spout off his or her opinion on the topic du jour. But with much more than 140 characters or .gif memes deployed to develop a response/message, things just seemed a bit more nuanced, less dependent on immediacy of response. I will admit that I have largely abandoned Twitter this year due to the "echo effect" I see when I see, like a burst of fireworks, one person, then a dozen, then maybe a hundred or more on my Twitter feed, sound off on something that seems more and more picayune to me with each passing day. Sometimes, it's just better to not say anything if all it is is just a rehash/retweet of someone else's opinion, over and over again.
But enough of the old man grouching. I am still happy that I have a place where I can muse on what literary work has grabbed my attention for the moment (right now, it is late 18th century American history). I don't worry about who reads this (I'm not posting links to this article anywhere else) or anything else on my blog. In a perverse way, it is comforting to know that a large percentage of those who do read my writings now (based on search engine hits) seem to be students looking for "information" *cough*plagiarizing*cough* on Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and others that I have reviewed in recent years. At least these visitors are here for info on literature and not my ephemeral opinion on some piddling "fandom" issue. A pox and several plagues on those houses!
As for the future, well...it's bright enough outside that I got to wear shades...
Yeah, a lot has changed since a barely 30 year-old me established this. I've seen the rise and fall of many individual blogs and the spread of that bligh...err, social media that links divers groups of people together. Twitter, podcasts, Tumblr, Reddit...none of that really existed in 2004, at least not in a mass consumption form. I don't begrudge people who communicate via those formats, but I will admit, while I pause to tell some kids to get off my lawn, that I think something has been lost in the change.
Granted, blogs themselves were rapid-response, "hot take" vehicles as well, where each blogger could (and did) quickly spout off his or her opinion on the topic du jour. But with much more than 140 characters or .gif memes deployed to develop a response/message, things just seemed a bit more nuanced, less dependent on immediacy of response. I will admit that I have largely abandoned Twitter this year due to the "echo effect" I see when I see, like a burst of fireworks, one person, then a dozen, then maybe a hundred or more on my Twitter feed, sound off on something that seems more and more picayune to me with each passing day. Sometimes, it's just better to not say anything if all it is is just a rehash/retweet of someone else's opinion, over and over again.
But enough of the old man grouching. I am still happy that I have a place where I can muse on what literary work has grabbed my attention for the moment (right now, it is late 18th century American history). I don't worry about who reads this (I'm not posting links to this article anywhere else) or anything else on my blog. In a perverse way, it is comforting to know that a large percentage of those who do read my writings now (based on search engine hits) seem to be students looking for "information" *cough*plagiarizing*cough* on Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and others that I have reviewed in recent years. At least these visitors are here for info on literature and not my ephemeral opinion on some piddling "fandom" issue. A pox and several plagues on those houses!
As for the future, well...it's bright enough outside that I got to wear shades...
Posts
2 comments:
Happy blog birthday, Larry!
Bill
Hey, congrats on the anniversary!
It's sad but I rarely read these days. Any book. And I haven't read any sf book for the last 2 years or more probably.
Anyway, it's sad to hear RAFO.com is shutting down, even though I barely visited it. I do consider it wotmania 2.0 and the good old wotmania.com will be a good memory. I guess it fit in the right time in my life.
Maciek
Post a Comment