Jim Groom, edtech guru, has been conducting interviews about writing at ReclaimTV. Many of the guests have been blogging for decades, and are very familiar to me from my years teaching at a distance, such as Bryan Alexander and Audrey Watters.
One of the most interesting interviews was Kate Bowles, who hasn’t blogged for years but influenced all of us when she did and now posts on Mastadon. In a broad ranging conversation, she discussed her own public writing, including her efforts to get back into it. She and Jim talked about how things have changed, the conversations that no longer take place on blogs, the echo chambers created by closed communities, and what survives with the prevalence of AI.
I am late to the term “fediverse”, and the more I learn about this idea of global, open, interconnected and independent sharing, the more it sounds like the World Wide Web when it was the Wild West. I wrote about that open web, and worried about losing it, in 2011 and 2012. Free, open, share — these are words from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I became an online educator and participant.
Historians, of course, look backward all the time. The web became closed in the same way as the American frontier, through privileging commercialism and private gain. As we talk about writing publicly, we tend to want to go back to when blogging was long-form communication with call-and-response, a way to thoroughly hash through various subjects by learning about various viewponts, and writing about them. We groan about how this world has been taken over by places that are either closed (Discord) or plagued with bad actors and focused on selling things (Facebook, Instagram, X).
Taking a broader cultural perspective on the present, above and beyond the complaints of writers themselves, doesn’t help. We see long-form writing in general going out of fashion (just ask those of us who write and try to sell our novels), AI normalizing bad bland prose, and a strong desire for less junk and more meaning.
Perhaps it is best to celebrate the fact that intellectual and poetic writing is vintage. Many of the objects I value, such as record albums and landline phones, were once popular forms but are now niche. Blogging, and indeed long-form writing in general, may occupy such a place historically. We mourn this and rage, because without long-form writing it is impossible to posit a convincing argument, present evidence of an outlandish thesis, or tell a full and meaningful story.
It doesn’t really matter where we do it, and if the fediverse* is the place for it, I’m in.
(*NB: for the record, I think that term is awful – I much prefer open web)
I admit that I am also a shirker of long-form reading, in particular of immersive reading as Gerhard Lauer described it (https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2020/09/13/reading-in-the-digital-age/ — his book is in German but freely available online such that the important parts can be translated).
But the other extreme on the unfortunate STREAM (as @hapgood described it somewhere) of microblogging is not for me, either, no matter whether the servers are decentrally federated or not. The stream itself feels very centralized to me, and I wonder if its trend can be compared to the many centripetal vs. centrifugal forces in history. Anyhow, I am with you liking the centrifugal phase of the old web.