So, being a meaning-preserver leads me to uncritically collect--and I think that blogging gives me the affordances of time and space in which to uncritically collect. And I like that. With facebook, I don't get this opportunity. I have to be quick; I think about what sentence or two another person could read. It's all very much a drive-by sort of thing.
With my blog, it is different. At this point, I am pretty damn sure that no one cares what I am writing here. I am kind of glad I left this baby silent for a long time because now I can speak and write and post images and videos and not think too much about what an audience might think--because I realize that if I ever had an audience, I must have lost the interest of that audience maybe two years ago.
Maybe the blog, however, is just different because I get to go on and on and on and can do so multimodally.
I can't quite describe it, but I can say that blogs have more affordances than facebook. At least I think they do. And I love that.
I am writing about what interests me, and everyone else can, too.
1 comment:
OK, so I agree with you about the differences that you point out between Facebook and blogging, and, for the most part, I also prefer the blog format over Facebook for reasons similar to yours, but, unlike you, I don't feel that it has to be a choice between the two -- it's not really a one or the other sort of deal. I mean, I think the real trick is to find a way to use both, ideally in conjunction with one another to share whatever it is that you're trying to share. Let's face it, writing is a social thing -- we write to communicate with an audience, to share something of ourselves with others -- and using new media, in some ways, makes that easier than ever. Even though people write a lot of different things for a lot of different reasons, essentially, at the heart of all writing is the desire to leave pieces of ourselves behind fluttering on the fences; we want to go beyond what we are as fragile physical beings and leave something behind for others, perhaps only with the hope of sharing our existence with others so that part of us lives on in another's memories after we leave, or perhaps with bigger goals like sharing ideas with the hope of initiating some sort of global change and improvement. In any case, we try to accomplish this through what we write, and because the ultimate goal of writing is sharing, audience is something of critical importance. Both Facebook and blogging afford the opportunity to share things with a large audience instantly, and by taking advantages of the differences -- the drive-by and the unabridged -- you can create a more complete digital identity, ultimately giving you a more effective platform for reaching your audience.
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