Day 213: Where have all the good blogs gone?

Got a load of stuff I’ve been thinking about, going to spew it out here pretty much as it comes out of my head…

Around 2010 I used to be involved in videogame blogging. It was the first time I’d felt I belonged anywhere, even if I only ever existed on the peripheries of the scene. The scene was a collection of earnest intellectual gamers mostly in their 20s and 30s, all with their own blogs and amateur websites, sitting just underneath the larger independent and mainstream sites, for whom the better writers would end up working.

It felt like we were all involved in this enormous conversation about where games were going, what they could be. You sat in your bedroom and lashed your theories, your critiques, your memories, together into a blog post, you uploaded it, and the next day you might find a writer from a major publication, or maybe a designer of one of the games you’d been discussing, had Tweeted you, emailed you, shared your post.

Blogs were a wonderful longform back-and-forth, a shared debate - regardless of the subject. Videogaming had its little corner, but the principles held true for any media, for politics, for comedy, for social issues, for housekeeping, mental health, surviving adult life.

Yes, some worried that amateur opinion was replacing journalistic integrity, but I think in the best cases it was more like a robust ecosystem with room for both. At the top level you had the exhaustively fact-checked, researched, professional journalism of the newspapers’ digital editions and the mainstream websites of every field. And from them stories would trickle down into the blogosphere, be disseminated, discussed, explored. And any interesting noise from the blogosphere would find its way back up, and out into the major publications.

I saw this happen first hand. I’d write crazed posts about the future of videogames as a medium, those posts would be reblogged on larger sites, and next thing major game designers would be discussing my thoughts on Twitter. Ideas were king, and if your ideas were good then you could bet on them finding their way to people who mattered. Blogging was a great leveler, and a great way of sharing ideas up and down the chain.

But blogging is now dead. It is decidedly uncool. In a fit of nostalgia the other night I went back through my old stomping grounds, my bookmarks folder for gaming, and one after another I found dead links, abandoned websites, blogs last updated in 2011. The town squares were deserted, a cold wind blowing through.

Of course some of this is that the earnest young bloggers from 2010 have graduated from their amateur post-uni online escapades. They’ve become comic book writers and game designers and YouTube commentators, and I’m not au fait with the next crop of upcoming writers.

But at the same time the landscape of the Internet has changed, and probably not for the better.

Picture how we used to go online. We’d come home from work or school, from phones that we used for sending 160-character messages and nothing else, switch on our computers or open our laptops, and spend a couple of hours in front of a monitor opening tabs, following hyperlinks, listening to new music, bookmarking articles, building a web of information about us.

What happens now? We spend all day online, but on minuscule screens on our phones, with clumsy touch controls, an environment that lends itself to scrolling down linear feeds of content, focused on only one tab or program, on one app, at once. And where a decade ago the Internet was a Wild West of voices, a town square of debate, that has now been paved into the cities and strip malls of Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

What I’m saying is we don’t go out and explore the Internet. We sit in gated communities scrolling down and down and down. We are presented with not differing opinions, lively debate, but simply more of what an algorithm thinks we like, echoing round and round.

… And by “like”, there, I mean “what we will be compelled to click on.” Whether we click, find nothing of worth, click back, and feel bad about ourselves, the algorithm cares not. It is a machine that offers us continual junk food, because we grab at junk food more than we grab at a cauliflower. And the apps don’t want us to eat healthily, they want us simply to sit fat and dazed so the advertising can do its thing.

Also: attention. We’re usually on our phones in stolen, distracted, interrupted moments while living our lives. We increasingly do not demarcate time to specifically pay attention, on purpose, to what we find online, because it is interesting and worthy. Instead we flip up Facebook in a cafe without realising we are doing so, because what our friend is saying right beside us doesn’t seem immediately relevant, and we lose ourselves mindlessly scrolling for thirty seconds, a minute, before snapping back. And we do this hundreds of times a day. And that is our experience of existing online.

……

So blogs, the idea of following debate through multiple blogs, all open at once, is less compatible with cramped phone screens and swipe controls, and the major apps aggressively work to coral users inside their spaces, rather than encouraging links to external sites. The result: no one blogs anymore.

So where has the conversation gone?

The short answer: YouTube. But I’d argue this migration has had a hugely detrimental effect on the discussion prevalent within our society, that it has stifled voices and harmed our collective intellectual health - even so far as to provide breeding grounds where ideologies of the far-right, of inherently anti-intellectual fascists, can flourish.

Will continue this tomorrow. Stay tuned.

……

AND, bonus paragraphs: gonna try out posting a few words about a different song every day, to get back into music - I stopped listening completely in the depths of my depression, I couldn’t even hear the music, it was just sound, and I’m completely out of the loop now. Any suggestions for songs, wing them this way.

Adore | Savages | 2016 - fitting for the theme of nostalgia today, found this at the top of a "tracks of 2016" list by Kieron Gillen, the man who made me believe writing about videogames could be a worthwhile pursuit. He’s now an acclaimed scribe for Marvel comics, and his own series, The Wicked & The Divine.

Song is gorgeous lilting, rising post-punk/noise rock; crunching guitar, doleful lyrics straining yet with hope. “Maybe I will die maybe tomorrow,” lead singer Jehnny Beth howls, “So I need to say / I adore life.” Walks the line between gloomy and transcendent. Magical.

Edit: Ung. Song was used in Peaky Blinders. Figures.