"Blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as active bloggers dropping by half between 2006 and 2009," report Tony Dokoupil and Angela Wu in a Newsweek story (August 16, 2010) titled, "Take This Blog and Shove it! When Utopian Ideals Crash into Human Nature—Sloth Triumphs." Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are alive and well, the authors tell us, because they "offer clear benefits to users, including the ability to easily stay in touch with friends, indulge in a game of Mob Wars, share baby pictures, or watch videos of fashion models falling down, in exchange for their time and efforts." Twitter, meanwhile, with its 50 million tweets a day, seems possessed of many lurkers and is not, apparently, a place where many choose to stick around. "Between 60 and 70 percent of people who sign up for the 140-character platform quit within a month, according to a recent Nielsen report."
What people are seeking, apparently, is rewards—rewards for building content, rewards for leaving comments, rewards for checking in. It comes as no surprise, of course, and indeed I've noted, among my blogging friends, a true shift, over the past year, in terms of those who shiver on the doorstep of a blog, and those who come to stay.
Tenacious, stubborn, call me what you will—I'm still hanging out my blogging shingle. Blogging is no experiment to me, no call for attention, no wanting of rewards. It is a place where some of my thinking, my photographs, my living lives. It is a place where I've met you.
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