O noez! Golden Age B bein ovah!

[oursin]

Article (via ozarque): The golden age of the digital diarist may be over. Have we realized blogging isn't as fun as it sounds? Or that we're not so interesting after all?

Am I being unduly cynical to think that 'we' here means 'me + a few people I spoke to last week?' Especially as I know lots and lots of people who don't blog, have never blogged and are generally rather boggled at the concept; meanwhile my actual flist is the reverse of actually shrinking.

Am reminded of big debate a few months since on umbrella organisation for numerous academic listservs as to whether listserv b ded and we should all be moving our efforts to blogs or wikis or whatever. I still get significant numbers of posts on my listservs and they appear to be in fairly healthy shape as regards membership. Because for some things they actually work rather well and in different ways from blogs or wikis.

This intersects with a comment I made on the 'advice from new writers' panel at Fourth Street Fantasy, in which I'm not sure I made exactly the point I wanted to make, which was that just because it's the future doesn't mean that everyone's on the bleeding furthest edge of the new technology, because people aren't even now, and they get by. Take-up is neither immediate nor universal (another point I failed to get as it came to me sur l'escalier was I would like to see sf in which things don't work perfectly straight off all the time...).

People haven't stopped writing letters or making telephone calls, just because they can use email. They still read books.

Modes of communication are added unto rather than superseded, is my guess, and the uses made of particular modes may mutate as others appear. But they don't vanish. After all, chiselling words into stone (actually, I guess they use drills these days?) is still something that is done for tombstones and statues and so on.

Comments

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

One of my profs, who runs a huge listserv in his specialty, told us about a professor who wrote to him last year asking to be added to the listserv, saying that she had "gotten the email" and wanted to become active with it. :) Early adopters often can't even conceive of the three-toed sloth of the adopting world, but they're definitely there.

(Blogging is still fun, and I am even more interesting than I was when I started five and a half years ago, thankyouverymuch.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, it's not even just the people who don't have e-mail who still write letters and talk on the phone. I'm going to send a postcard off in today's post, and I e-mailed the person who's getting it just last week.

I hate those "my best friend's cousin said this, and so do I, so it must be true" articles.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I was rereading Mary Wortley Montagu's letters yesterday, with recourse to the recent Isolbel Grundy bio, and reflecting on how those inclined to interchange are going to by whatever method. This really hit me when I was reading about Montagu and her current friend Mary Anstell writing poems on either side of a paper in reference to a recent event when a guy did something to his wife of one day so she died. The poems got passed around with other society folks' commentary added; this sort of thing also happened in China, when novels got amended, and the emendations and comments became as important to read as the original.

All this reminds me so much of wikis, hypertext, blogging. Those who want to communicate, to discourse on text, are going to find a way (the closest way) to do that, and others? Shrug, never had any interest in the first place.

[sacred-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

I'd second the idea that we communicate more as we gain more technologies. Though I must admit I hardly ever use my phone anymore (except for calling the parents) because myself and a lot of my friends are phonephobic to a greater or lesser extent, so we send each other long emails and texts and facebook messages instead. But I do still phone people sometimes - sometimes it's the best.

And I still write proper letters (as often as I ever did, though less often than I'd like) to friends, and I write quite differently (content and style) in letters than in emails. I send letters to friends overseas and they send postcards back, because there's nothing like the thud of paper through your letterbox.

I still, occasionally, keep a paper diary, as well as my blog. But actually, far from making me disappear up my own arse (as blogging is sometimes said to make one do) it's made me less morbidly introspective, because I know I'll be boring people and people turn up and say *hugs* and give brilliant advice. And when I waffle on my lj about a book I've read, or a film I've seen, it's so much more fun, because people pop up to say they've seen or read it and what they thought. The picture of bloggers as sad little orators preaching to no-one is wildly inaccurate, in my experience, at least.

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

Showing what happens when technology doesn't work right is an excelllent tool for the writer who needs to 1) draw the attention of the character to something they don't normally notice, esp. in tight 3rd person, and 2) to tell the audience something that all of the characters already know. Who goes around explaining the basics of cell-phone or e-mail use, unless they've stopped and you've got to figure out why?

Your point about old and new technology co-existing is well-taken. I had the experience recently of trying to collaborate with people younger than me. I wanted to use e-mail, the twenty-year-old wanted to use text messages, and the sixteen-year-olds wanted to use comments on Myspace. E-mail is apparently for old dudes and dudettes, even though there are plenty of people in the first world who haven't yet used it.

There's also the Douglas Adams line about technology being a word for something that doesn't work right yet. One doesn't call a chair technology, normally.

[redbird]

The other question of course is, interesting to who? I haven't clicked through, but it seems to me that the "we're not [and you're certainly not] that interesting" reaction can mean either that people are less interested in the minor points of strangers' lives, or that some people aren't very good at knowing which pieces of their lives will be of interest to strangers, and in how much detail. There are things I put in my journal primarily for myself and pameladean, though they are in no sense private. That I have had surgery recently is something I'll mention fairly casually; five years from now I expect to barely talk about it, and only if someone brings the matter up; and I don't expect the details of the experience to be of interest after the fact, since I'm not even interested in most of them now that it's over. Also, to the extent that something like an online journal is part-diary, it may be partly for the writer's later reference. (Hence, lots of boring medical detail, all cut-tagged and labeled so people could easily skip it: but a year from now, I can easily pull up all posts with the relevant tag.)

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

My guess is that what is passing is the sense that it's such a big deal, as opposed to just another way of writing a diary/letter/making a phone call/hanging out/or sometimes giving a presentation. That there's a mystic quality to it.

There isn't. But that's fine with me. People are getting used to the new technology and so the elements that were once wild and strange and attractively different are coming to be taken for granted, but it probably means that there will be more overall stability in interactions online. (or if not, that it will be on purpose--one's rudeness should always be on purpose, doncher know.)