Blogging is part of the social internet, as opposed to the walled-off apps of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…). You own your blog web address and its content instead of renting space from companies intent on keeping you inside their confines as they sell data about you.
Blogging is free of the Liking economy, but participates in the Sharing economy. Once a blog is up and running, it doesn’t matter if anyone likes it. It finds its own obsessions and in so doing generates its own momentum.
Blogging creates its own community. The momentum generated by writing about your interests and putting that online leads other people to you. My blog, for example, has been cited in books and Amazon press blurbs. That’s the Sharing economy in action.
Blogging makes your thinking public. A blog is an archive of your thoughts, hypotheses, and connections that is searchable by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Blogging encourages longer form explorations of whatever you find interesting or significant. The pleasure of pursuing your interests in long form is an antidote to the Shallow Life, however you define that. Distilled to its essentials, a blog post says: Hey, look what I found. Or, Hey, consider what I’m thinking about. Sharing your distilled interests leads you to a deeper level of engagement.
Blogging encourages you to think through whether or not what you want to say has substance. As you blog, you evaluate what is and isn’t worth saying.
Blogging promotes independent thought. Yes, there are many a blog dedicated to say, stream of consciousness poetry, but these are noises amongst signals. As you think through what is and isn’t worth saying, make your thinking public through longer form explorations, create community, free yourself from the Liking economy, and join the social internet, it helps you ignore the noises and focus on the good stuff—which is what everyone else is not talking about.
Try to be a signal, not a noise.
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Some other posts on blogging:
https://brettworks.com/2011/12/13/on-the-nature-of-blogs/
https://brettworks.com/2014/02/25/on-the-nature-of-blogs-iii/
https://brettworks.com/2019/08/02/on-going-all-in-ten-reasons-to-blog/
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