Day seven

I’ve been thinking about Kathryn’s recent post about #blogjune. I particularly like her description of how things have changed: “Over a decade, library blogging slipped from infrequent, to marginal, to artisan.”

This year I think there are what, six, maybe seven, people doing the whole blog-everyday-in-June challenge. For me blogging has changed a lot, from being something I did almost daily, to something that feels almost quaint to be doing now. #Blogjune went from being a regular part of my year, to something that until this year, I hadn’t thought seriously about doing for about four years. This year I probably wouldn’t have bothered, if June hadn’t coincided with my thinking about how to record my drawing project and feeling vaguely unsatisfied with Instagram as a platform for sharing. (Don’t get me wrong, Instagram is very easy to use, and I’ve got a nice little network going there now, but, well, it’s Instagram. The limitations around how you can present your photos irk me at times, and I find the ads quite intrusive. And of course, the platform is not really mine.)

I’m not really sure why I’m bothering to spend time writing and posting my photos of my drawings. Possibly it’s just another manifestation of my perennial desire to leave some sort of record. Cleaning out my study this past weekend I had to shake my head at all the diaries and notebooks I’ve scribbled in over the years – at all the inanities I’ve attempted to record. I’ve been keeping some form of diary/journal for decades. I don’t necessarily write every day but if I were to assemble all the notebooks and journals from over the years I’m pretty sure there would be a record of every year, even if it’s scattered across unfinished notebooks and very mundane. I’m not sure where the impulse to record comes from. I hope someone reads this, but I don’t make much of an attempt to tell anyone about this space. Sure, I tweet about each post but only a small group of people sees my tweets these days, and I don’t seem to talk about this blog outside my online circle of friends.

Social media killed changed blogging for me. When I’d tweet about a new post and people responded to the tweet rather than commenting directly on the post, eventually all the conversation just moved to Twitter. For a while Twitter filled that niche for me, where I had my connections and conversations with people online. I’m not sure what happened for me with Twitter – possibly too many political posts started making the space feel fraught, too many arguments, too much self-righteousness? It’s very hard to listen to/for nuance in tweets. I didn’t delete my Twitter account but moved over to Instagram. I’ve been a bit more careful on Instagram and try to keep it light. It’s interesting to see that Instagram has its own cultures and ways of being on that platform that are different to Twitter. (Dog insta, fountain pen insta, book insta, etc etc etc)

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. I’m just thinking about all the change over the years, I guess. I looked through some of my old journals this weekend and thought about how some things about me haven’t changed at all, while others have (I really worried about that back then?!). Things change, stop, become something else. But maybe the important things stay the same – reflection, connection, communication.