Bloggery

Short post today. I haven’t considered my early days on Blogger and WordPress until now. They were outlets for all kinds of writing.

Been working on a chapter about the early years of social media and blogging. This paragraph needs work yet it captures one way I used the platforms in those early blogging days.

When I began blogging in 2007, I had no idea where it would go. I wrote more than 5,600 posts since the beginning. For a long time, it was the only writing I did each day. It became a writer’s workbench to test ideas and how to express them. Some days the posts were cringe worthy. Some days I touched the sky. Part of me would like to return to handwriting paper journals the way I did before 2007. Part of me does not.

I also re-wrote the first paragraph of the chapter. Next I will re-do the rest.

I also mention social media in it. I was active on half a dozen platforms and joined Facebook in March 2008, after which made this brief post:

Tonight I joined Facebook. Yikes! Facebook connects us to people we have not thought of in years. In some cases we haven’t made contact in over a quarter of a century. All within a couple of hours. From moment to moment, the number of “friends” builds. What to say on the site? What elements to show? What pictures to place? How much time to spend? When a friend accepts the invitation, it feels good. The wave has broken, now I’ll ride it in.

If there was excitement at first, when our child stopped posting there I lost interest. It took a while yet in 2025 I deactivated my account. My problem was the contrast between lots of activity and the loneliness I felt as a result of being increasingly away from the real world. There is a kind of relationship on social media, I determined it was not a good one.

The purpose of the chapter is to figure out the meaning of all this. Maybe I will.