The demise of proper blogging.

 I think we all need to face something here.  The world is moving on.

Grandad's site - Entertaining and informing to the end.  It is sad to see it go.  I suppose I'll have to remove its link in the sidebar now.

Talking to many younger people these days, the vast majority simply don't want to read anything longer than a few hundred words at most.  Video instructions seem to be rapidly replacing the traditional (and in my opinion much more user friendly), step 1 to 10 type of written idiot's guides.  Stopping a video and scrolling back to a point where you missed something is far from ideal, where good written instructions can at least be followed at any users own pace.  I'm not even a great fan of most video posts on YouTube and the like.  A colleague, during a car related conversation,  recommended a post to me about the depreciation of electric cars.  It was more than half an hour long, yet the relevant information in it would not have filled more than one short paragraph of writing!  By the time it got to the relevant bits, I was losing the will to live, yet the poster is popular and gets hundreds of thousands of views.  

Hell, there are quite a few of those in my workplace, even some in their 30's, where I tried to open a conversation with them like, "what do you think of.......?", (referring to some big news story from the morning news), they have no opinion, because they are unaware that the war/murder/ hurricane/ budget even happened.  They don't watch or follow current affairs because they don't want bad news.  And as for anything made before the Millennium; it's treated like something prehistoric and unworthy of consideration.  One guy in work mentioned watching Big Brother the other day, to which I replied that George Orwell's ideas sometimes didn't seem so far fetched these days.  I got a puzzled stare in return.  He had never heard of George Orwell!  These are people with good university educations, working in specialised IT roles, but their world view seems very limited to me.

A few have even told me that they never watch black and white movies.  Just imagine what they are missing by not even considering Cagney's White Heat, or Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.  Somehow the fantasy of superheroes and CGI dragons appeals to the exclusion of everything else. If there is no history, there can be no common cause across the generations, and no learning from humanities many past mistakes.  Fantasy does not work in the real world.  It's like seeing a T-Rex bearing down on you, but instead of running, they close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, and shout "La, La, La" to cover the noise of their own demise.  There are exceptions of course, but they are few and far between.  Nothing exists in a vacuum, not even the current world or its future.

Anyway, back to blogging.  Yes, we are all getting older, especially those of us who write this type of blog.  That aging process means that over time sites will disappear, along with their owners.  This is old technology, so was taken up by people who are now getting older.  Yet I do not think this is the primary cause of the shift to social media sites like Farcebook.  The main difference between sites like this, and those on Farcebook etc is like the difference between push and pull.  To know about this site, you first have to find it, and that involves either a genuine recommendation from someone already viewing these rants, or a very lucky search.  We have to pull readers in, largely by networking , but also with a bit of luck on occasion.  There is some area of crossover between proper blogging and Farcebook et al, but by contrast, content received by people is largely pushed to the users there, and that involves money.  The person or organisation with the most money has the loudest voice, something I disagree with intently.  It reduces normal people to the role of mere consumers, limits choice and knowledge, and pushes world views that divide rather than unite us.  It allows idiots like Trump to deny climate change or anything else they choose.  It is the opposite of science.  Science has to be peer reviewed (and the methodologies by which scientific data is collected is often criticised or proved incorrect as a result), while he has a large, willing, and gullible audience, because he has power and money.  He and many others push their unprovable and unverified views, while people would have to study the science that contradicts them, pulling in a true understanding.

I've probably gone off on a bit of a tangent here (yet again).  One of the main points of this post was simply that the future of blogging like this is sinking slowly in the west.  What I would hate is that this could also be used as an analogy for the wider world.