Back to the Blog

One of the most-read pieces I’ve written here remains my entreaty “Professors Start Your Blogs,” which is now 12 years old but might as well have been written in the Victorian age. It’s quaint. In 2006, many academics viewed blogs through the lens of LiveJournal and other teen-oriented, oversharing diary sites, and it seemed silly to put more serious words into that space. Of course, as I wrote that blog post encouraging blogging for more grown-up reasons, Facebook and Twitter were ramping up, and all of that teen expression would quickly move to social media.

Then the grown-ups went there, too. It was fun for a while. I met many people through Twitter who became and remain important collaborators and friends. But the salad days of “blog to reflect, tweet to connect” are gone. Long gone. Over the last year, especially, it has seemed much more like “blog to write, tweet to fight.” Moreover, the way that our writing and personal data has been used by social media companies has become more obviously problematic—not that it wasn’t problematic to begin with.

Which is why it’s once again a good time to blog, especially on one’s own domain. I’ve had this little domain of mine for 20 years, and have been writing on it for nearly 15 years. But like so many others, the pace of my blogging has slowed down considerably, from one post a week or more in 2005 to one post a month or less in 2017.

The reasons for this slowdown are many. If I am to cut myself some slack, I’ve taken on increasingly busy professional roles that have given me less time to write at length. I’ve always tried to write substantively on my blog, with posts often going over a thousand words. When I started blogging, I committed to that model of writing here—creating pieces that were more like short essays than informal quick takes.

Unfortunately this high bar made it more attractive to put quick thoughts on Twitter, and amassing a large following there over the last decade (this month marks my ten-year anniversary on Twitter) only made social media more attractive. My story is not uncommon; indeed, it is common, as my RSS reader’s weekly article count will attest.

* * *

There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.

I’ve already mentioned the relative ease and short amount of time it takes to express oneself on centralized services. People are chronically stretched, and building and maintaining a site, and writing at greater length than one or two sentences seems like real work. When I started this site, I didn’t have two kids and two dogs and a rather busy administrative job. Overestimating the time regular people have to futz with technology was the downfall of desktop linux, and a key reason many people use Facebook as their main outlet for expression rather a personal site.

The technology for self-hosting has undoubtedly gotten much better. When I added a blog to dancohen.org, I wrote my own blogging software, which sounds impressive, but was just some hacked-together PHP and a MySQL database. This site now runs smoothly on WordPress, and there are many great services for hosting a WordPress site, like Reclaim Hosting. It’s much easier to set up and maintain these sites, and there are even decent mobile apps from which to post, roughly equivalent to what Twitter and Facebook provide. Platforms like WordPress also come with RSS built in, which is one of the critical, open standards that are at the heart of any successful version of the open web in an age of social media. Alas, at this point most people have invested a great deal in their online presence on closed services, and inertia holds them in place.

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

When I left Facebook eight years ago, it showed me five photos of my friends, some with their newborn babies, and asked if I was really sure. It is unclear to me if the re-decentralizers are willing to be, or even should be, as ruthless as this. It’s easier to work on interoperable technology than social psychology, and yet it is on the latter battlefield that the war for the open web will likely be won or lost.

* * *

Meanwhile, thinking globally but acting locally is the little bit that we can personally do. Teaching young people how to set up sites and maintain their own identities is one good way to increase and reinforce the open web. And for those of us who are no longer young, writing more under our own banner may model a better way for those who are to come.

Comments

[…] Back to the Blog — Read on dancohen.org/2018/03/21/back-to-the-blog/ […]

Welcome (more) back here, dear Dan.

Jane Leonard says:

thanks for the nudge to start my own blog

[…] From Dan Cohen, “Back to the Blog“: […]

I’ve maintained a website since NYE 1995, and my blog archives go back to 2001. I’ve been trying to blog more this year too. I never quit, but it was kind of sparse for a few years.

[…] 2. Back to the Blog “In 2006, many academics viewed blogs through the lens of LiveJournal and other teen-oriented, oversharing diary sites, and it seemed silly to put more serious words into that space. Of course, as I wrote that blog post…” […]

[…] Cohen is another person who is forsaking social media and returning to blogging. His reasons and opinions reflect mine, although he is probably more eloquent about it. In the […]

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[…] I met many people through Twitter who became and remain important collaborators and friends. But the salad days of “blog to reflect, tweet to connect” are gone. Long gone. Over the last year, especially, it has seemed much more like “blog to write, tweet to fight.” – Back to the Blog […]

[…] loved this post about this post about the trend among a few to return to the lonely practice of blogging even if that means to lose […]

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jessamyn says:

Wooooo, never stopped and I’m on trend again! Thanks Dan.

[…] like Jason Kottke and Dan Cohen have written interesting things about the place that the independent blog occupies on the web. If […]

Paul Merrill says:

It is encouraging to those of us who have blogged for a long time to see people coming back – even if only in small numbers.

[…] feeling has only been reinforced by Dan Cohen’s recent entry on his own site entitled “Back to the Blog.” I’ve been very vocal on Twitter recently about Facebook’s business model, the […]

[…] Yesterday an interesting post by Jason B. Jones at ProfHacker titled Time for Blogs Again? popped up in my newsfeed. I read it with great interest and it really spoke to some of my own feelings about blogs and blogging. In the post Jones shares observations about how social media—Facebook and Twitter—have “colonized” (my word, not his) other forms of online existence. Jones also summarizes some points made by Dan Cohen in an interesting post titled “Back to the Blog.” […]

Dan says:

Creating content on your own site should have been everyone’s goal all along. Online services can always go away or have issues (AOL, MySpace, Facebook and so on). Social media should be used to drive people to your own site.

[…] The article. This really resonated with me because I realized, as I read Dan Cohen’s words, that I’m doing it. The shift from blogging in the old-fashioned sense to sharing words and […]

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AHLondon says:

All of this. I even wrote a Blogs as a Home Address post about three years ago but then lost faith in my own prediction and all but left my blog. (I still have the address and am rebuilding now.) One note on your psyychology point, because of Facebook’s missteps, it has lost much of the feel of people are there. Those who are there are less interactive. They aren’t on as often and reluctant to share or comment on blog posta are articles unless in a closed group. That’s part privacy concerns and part FB algorithm not putting links in friends’ or followers’ feeds.

Facebook’s advantage in a sense of being where people has dwindled, significantly.

Over the years (quite some years ago) I ran a handful of “back2blog” challenges, to try and get people writing on their blogs again. They worked, but once the challenge was over, we all folded back into Facebook.

I’ve been writing more on my blog these last six months or so. One thing that helped me was to try and go back to the early days of pre-social-media blogging, when I’d write much shorter pieces than the essay-like ones. I realised that one of the things that made me write things that could very well have been blog posts on facebook rather than on my blog was that I had come to see blog posts as “articles”, complete with a proper title, appropriate categories and tags, and to make it worse, as I’m bilingual, a short summary of what I was writing in my “other language”.

To do that, I started posting things as “asides” — a post type WordPress provides with for somewhat lesser content. I also decided that my 45-minute commute on the train was more than enough time to crank out a quick post, and when I’m not travelling with colleagues, I really make an effort to write stuff.

I really believe that unless Facebook et al backpedal in making their platforms less addictive (cf. Clay Shirky’s segment in this OTM episode) we are definitely going to see people falling back on their blogs.

Now let me go and find a no-nonsense-no-frills newsreader so I can subscribe to this one.

[…] Up until today, the last thing I posted of any substance here was almost three years ago. Back when I started blogging, there were no social networks. Blogging was very social for me. I was going though my email archives this week and thanks to my digital hoarding, I have all of my blog comments in my email. Reading through a few of them, I couldn’t help but be nostalgic. It was nostalgia for the community and the conversation. I miss it. I used to experience it on Twitter, but that’s long gone now. I love writing for many reasons and I’ve continued doing it mostly in the form of journals that I don’t share publicly. I do miss writing for the web though. I miss the healthy feedback loop. I miss the conversations that can come from sharing ideas with other people. I’ve been scared to leave Twitter. I’ve been even more scared to start publishing on my own domain again. The thing that has really been holding me back from blogging again is what Dan Cohen refers to as ambient humanity in his post, “Back to the Blog”. […]

[…] want to transform them yet again. And one bit of that potential transformation is leading me, with Dan Cohen, back to blogging, and, with Alan Jacobs, to ponder returning to some related technologies as […]

[…] articles bubbling to the surface. Tom Critchlow’s “Small b blogging” and Dan Cohen’s “Back to the Blog” come to mind and are great reads on a renewed interest in, and support of, blogging on the open […]

[…] (OMG remember that??). Dan Cohen makes the case for taking control of our social content and going “Back to the Blog.” Dan makes an interesting point about the sense of “ambient humanity” (love that term!) […]

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[…] or two ago when it was our national pastime to complain about email? More recently, as I’ve reassessed this blog, my social media presence, and our centralized digital platforms in general, I’ve come to […]

[…] a movement to reclaim blogging as a vibrant, vital space in academia. Dan Cohen, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Alan Jacobs have written about their renewed efforts to have smart […]

[…] Cohen says “ambient humanity” is what keeps people yoked to the giant platforms; I prefer to reiterate that people are […]

[…] through the lens of Chris Aldrich, and the benefits of doing it yourself through the experience of Dan Cohen. I don’t aim to emulate them just yet (I’m not terribly technically minded), but I get […]

[…] Back to the Blog by Dan Cohen, via Stephen Downes – “Meanwhile, thinking globally but acting locally is the little bit that we can personally do. Teaching young people how to set up sites and maintain their own identities is one good way to increase and reinforce the open web. And for those of us who are no longer young, writing more under our own banner may model a better way for those who are to come.” […]

[…] Here is Dan Cohen, a fellow with many more credentials than I, saying basically what I said about getting away from social media and focusing more on the blog, but in fancier words. […]

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