Is Blogging Dead? Not Exactly, But . . .

Typing the keywords "Is blogging dead?" into the principal search of engine of the day invariably leads one to a long list of links to sites emphatically answering "No, of course not!" as they proceed to offer glib advice--as they try to sell you something (for instance, one of their blogs).

Thus does it go with today's Internet--ask a question, and get not an answer but a sales pitch--in a veritable monument to what Cory Doctorow so rightly calls the "enshittification" of the Internet.

Naturally, getting somewhere requires us to think more precisely. Clearly people are still writing blogs, and the evidence is that many blogs are still attracting readers, and so in that sense blogging is not dead.

But I do not think that is what most have in mind when they raise the question. People "blog" in many ways, for many reasons. There are blogs operated by major businesses and other institutions, for example, where prominent individuals put out statements of public consequence for a limited expert audience likely to retail what they have to say to a broader public.

However, for the vast majority of the world blogging is nothing like that. What they mean when they speak of blogging is a person who is not connected with a major platform, who is not in their own right famous, setting up such a platform with little or no money spent, no assistance from anyone else, and no prospect of making their blogging a full-time activity, in the reasonable expectation of presenting their words to the world and somehow finding a readership. If they have something that resonates, maybe a big readership. Maybe even going viral!

And what they mean when they ask "Is blogging dead?" is the extent to which such a hope exists.

The boosters on the aforementioned web sites to which the search engines so relentlessly lead us have no interest whatsoever in the question "Is blogging dead?" when asked in that sense

My answer is that, contrary to the impression given by an idiot media ever trafficking in aspirational garbage that if actually followed is apt to be self-destructive, the hope was always extremely slim. The most obvious reason is that the ratio of "producers" of online content to "consumers" has been extremely high from the start, making the scene something like The Hunger Games, times a million--with some much more disadvantaged than others, like those trying to offer something of substance via a medium not particularly well-equipped for its provision. (After all, as one writer who so far as I can tell never even tried to offer anything of substance was well-equipped to explain, "The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another"--not have intelligent discussions.)

It has only got worse since. Much, much worse. I can think of at least four very well-attested reasons why.

1. The decline of free-range Internet searching. Instead people access the Internet through social media and its associated filters, making "discovery" less likely (even if you get your blog onto social media).

2. The increasingly pay-to-play character of the Internet entailed by the aforementioned "enshittification," where others' search engine optimization, ad-buying and the rest get them ahead in the search rankings at your expense--while any effort you make to get ahead without laying out the cash gets you penalized. (Kind of like how the people who hand out Oscars wanted to punish Andrea Riseborough for having got an Oscar nomination by way of low-budget promotion by people who were actually enthusiastic about her movie and her performance instead of a $30 million studio campaign.)

3. The favoritism search engines show to "authoritative" content in the name of keeping the minds of the masses unsullied by "fake news" and the like. This means that the non-"authoritative"--anyone not connected with a big, big-budget platform--gets pushed down in the search rankings. And "This means you!" (Probably.) Finally, there is

4. The feedback loop that amplifies all of these tendencies. Get demoted in the search rankings for any reason--or more likely still, for many of them--and fewer people will happen upon your blog. This will get you downgraded yet again, making that many fewer people happen on you again. And so on and so forth in a vicious circle toward a readership of exactly . . . one person, yourself.

As if this were not enough there are the other factors that make blogs generally less likely to land an audience--like a discourse adapted to 140 (or is it 280?) characters at a time, max, and people flocking to "vlogs" over blogs because, reinforced by declining literacy levels, vlogs don't require you to "Read stuff." And so on and so forth.

All of this has turned the Hunger Games-times-a-million into, I suspect, something more like the Super Hunger Games-times-a-billion, the "attention economy" become that much more brutal (and punitive), which has made things worse yet again by encouraging lowest common denominator content. Thus does it seem that those who do write independently incline ever more toward the clickbaity--to the gossipy and the confessional, to hot button-pushing, to meaningless lists and worse than meaningless self-help, to forgotten-in-five-minutes ultra-topicality. Meanwhile, if things do indeed still go viral (I am doubtful that they actually do so, but people say it happens nonetheless), it is almost always the case that they are exceedingly stupid things, about which only stupid people would care about.

Like stupid Ben Affleck looking constipated at a stupid awards show, and people turning it into a "meme," and commentators remarking the face in the meme as somehow the very picture of the world's misery in 2023. (A world sinking ever deeper into a polycrisis of economic and ecological collapse, where hunger spreads and pandemic after pandemic rages, and war spreads and rages, with the fighting in Ukraine possibly already escalated into World War III, and the visage of this narcissistic mediocrity whom life has treated obscenely well next to 99.999 percent of the other people on the planet looking slightly less than pleased with life as he sits next to Jennifer Lopez at the damned Grammys is the "mask of unadorned misery?" to these people? Even as irony, which is profoundly overrated, this is too much.)

Looking at such drivel it is very, very, very hard indeed for even someone as critical of the "Idiocracy" view of the world as I am to believe that the world has not already degenerated into Mike Judge's dystopia--the more in as any blogger who is not catering to complete nitwits has to compete with all that. The result is that where their chances of commanding an appreciable audience today are concerned it is not quite absolute zero it is awfully close to it--justifying the view that, for them, blogging, if not dead, may as well be.