Last February, I posted a discussion entitled “Whither the Spankosphere”, in which I noted the number of spanking blogs that appeared to be inactive. For sure, new sites still pop up on a regular basis, but am sensing a general trend and wanted to revisit the debate.
My Google Reader has a category called “Spanking – Friends”, which includes the forty or so people I know in person who have blogs. A check at the weekend showed that, in the nine days since I’d last checked the feeds, less than a third of the bloggers concerned had updated their sites.
That it had been so long since I last looked for updates seems to me to be, in itself, indicative of something of a blogging malaise. Twelve, eighteen months ago, I used to head for the blogs each morning to connect with friends – to see what they were doing, thinking, discussing. Now, for that? It’s straight onto my Twitter account the moment I sign onto the web. Meanwhile, the discussions and debates that used to happen here with and between our real-life friends are increasingly rare – their, our interaction these days is far more likely to be tweeted (or even, not that I use it personally, via Facebook for friendships that often now span the vanilla and spanking worlds). It’s rather as if the kinky world has migrated.
Where does that leave blogs, particularly the (relatively few) literary blogs such as The Spanking Writers? I still see a place for longer pieces of writing, such as we post here: there’s only so much one can say in 140 characters. As a means of exploring and sharing fantasies and perspectives on our kink, blogging still IMHO remains the best format available.
Twitter, on the other hand, is frankly a far better medium for a community of friends wanting to keep in regular touch than were the comments pages of our and others’ blogs. (And, of course, I’m not denigrating the skill of many tweeters, the fine art of communicating so concisely requiring considerable skill – “excuse me writing you a long letter: I didn’t have time to write you a short one”).
But as people turn to Twitter first, their RSS readers and blog reading relatively neglected, does this trend spell the inevitable death-knell for the blogosphere in the medium term – an inexorable decline in posts, comments, readers? I’d be interested in your views.
If it is any consolation, dear, this is still where I head first of a morning… even if Twitter does follow moments later. 😉
I certainly hope not. I like the depth of discussion that is available on some of the blogs. I also stubbornly refuse to get a twitter account.
Ever the optimist I believe blogs which stand a “publishable in other formats” test – where the content is of more than than in the moment interest and there is a distinct and compelling voice – will continue to thrive and attract new and active readers/commentators to energise the discussions. It does take a two way commitment.
Does this mean I can blame my inattentive blogging on Twitter, even though I don’t use Twitter? I’d really, really like to.
Long live the literary blogs! The dirty kind, that is.
I am a dinosaur. I miss Usenet. I miss it because it was so freekin convenient to have almost all my friends in one place. Between blogs, Facebook, twitter, mailing lists, Fetlife I can’t keep up, and I feel rather out of touch. And my former community is scattered all over the place. Maybe I just suck at social networking.
I do think that Twitter has the ambiance (can there be virtual ambiance?) of an ongoing chat. That is, while responses might get delayed by absence, and while many of us miss hours of the conversation at a time, Twitter is very much a COMMUNITY wherein we are actually interacting with each other. It is the town square, or the high school courtyard, or anywhere a crowd gathers in fluid small groups. Gossip travels rampantly, and so does good news.
Facebook (and I don’t have a kinky one but do have an active vanilla one) is more like a front porch. As we walk/drive by, we see who is sitting out and what they are talking about. If interested, we stop in and join the discussion. And, by way of politeness, we call out HAPPY BIRTHDAY whenever we see a bouquet of balloons or a crowd of well-wishers.
Blogs… I think blogs do have a place. They are a place for us to tell tales and to think. I, too, have seen and made attempts to have in-depth or complex discussions on twitter, and it just doesn’t work. On the other hand, by its very nature, the author must begin by asking a question or proposing a thesis to generate the discussion. They are a mix of public readings in cafes and bookshops, and something of the old rhetorical school of Socrates. I think of my political science professor sitting outside under a tree, offering a 5-minute exposition on John Locke, and thirty bright-eyed students listening and arguing with him for 45 minutes … during the lunch hour. (There is, of course, another sort of blog of which I am not a personal fan, and that is the ones which compile photos from for-pay sites. But then again, it serves its purpose in the community and there’s no need for me to think these sites will go away. The affiliate programs are valuable and good advertising.)
To be fair, I think Fetlife is as close as we will ever come to Usenet, but I just can’t make it part of my daily life. It’s a mix of quick Twitter with long-thoughtful blogging, and it eats time like nothing else. But it works for many people (my husband included).
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Interesting comments, everyone. And rather illustrative of my point, I think, that none of the folks I gossip with regularly on Twitter has commented – I guess they’re all too busy there
Fetlife’s an interesting dimension to the date. I rather like it – indeed, I met one of my girlfriends after she contacted me via it. I personally find it too sprawling, don’t like the design that much and find it all a bit intimidating!
@Serenity – I think you hint at what I see as the issue. Blogs were, for a while, the place where the “community” interacted – in the days when soc.sexuality.spanking had started its decline and before Twitter arrived. There’s still a sense of “community” here, I’d like to think – and there’s a limit as to how often we post things deliberately provoking debate or soliciting replies. But it’s different in nature than it was a couple of years back – perhaps less immediate, more considered?
Whatever, we still love all the contributions and comments that we receive.
And anyone not on Twitter? Honestly, it’s worth dipping your toes in the water. @abeljenkins if any of you want to connect there!
@Abel It is a slightly different take on this but is there a question too about how a blogger retires gracefully from the field or asks for more collaboration ?
I assume at the macro level blogs will continue to flourish (maybe with versions .2 etc) because they have extrinsic value for the blogger (career for journalists, book sales for writers, cathartic to people stuck in the midst of some sort of organisational chaos- though this latter also has risks)
But personally what do I do if this isn’t the case and it all starts to feel too much of a burden. I find I have diminishing time available because of all my other social network commitments, have created a community which now meets my needs via Twitter, have mined the creative sources which energise my blogging ?
I am not sure that there is an easy way to say this, particularly if for some groups I feel I am serving a need. Do I just go quiet ?
You got me thinking… i too was wondering why i hadn’t comented for ages when i used to check this whole cluster of blogs all the time…
Fetlife is indeed most seductive – there’s a group for EVERYTHING, believe me!! – but although people do post “writings” its not really like “publication” since only fetlife friends can see it. twitter is fast and friendly but its not the place for debate; too few lines and too much chatter…of course the blogs aren’t always serious either and plenty of the posts are not much more than padded-out tweets (no offence, hey) – but from time to time there is a story to relate or a topic to ponder that needs the space a blog offers. So i will go on checking them…(they’re good fun anyway and sometimes quite hot!)
*less immediate, more considered?*- thats about it.
And please don’t stop blogging!!
It’s true, the first think that I did in the morning 18 months ago was check Jessica’s blog, then Emma’s (she has the best blogroll) to see what had gone down. Now I check my phone for BBMs and texts, then kink email, Informed Consent, uni email, facebook, twitter and finally blogs.
I suppose there’s lots of reasons. I have twitter on my blackberry, which is surgically attached to my hand. I have mini panic attacks without it. Checking blogs on my phone is pretty arduous.
I think blogs are less active amongst our real life friends. I rarely do, Jessica doesn’t anymore, Eliane and Emma’s are awesome but more sporadic than they used to be. Twitter is more instantly gratifying, and for me, more fun. I think blogging is contagious in a way, if my friends do then I want to. If it’s a slow blogging month then I kind of forget.
When I first started reading spanking blogs the majority of the posts I loved reading were about Jessica’s events. Reading about Lowewoods, Reformatories and House Parties was super exciting. Except now, I go to them, which unsurprisingly is more exciting! These days I find the idea of reporting how much I enjoyed a scene kind of jarring.
My vanilla friends have twitter, and follow me on it. It’s a nice bridge between the two worlds which is great as I’m more and more determined to have one word, not two.
I think blogposts still have a place, of course, but as I’m not as actively curious about spanking I don’t spend time seeking them out to read about it anymore, I read my friend’s blogs but not ones of people I don’t know in real life.
Twitter sits easier with some privacy concerns (you can protect your tweets, which makes me more chilled about saying my location, my friends’ names and putting up pictures). Blogging is very stark, and tends to involve putting up your emotions quite bluntly on t’internet, where as the shorter nature of tweets helps to avoid this. There’s debate, but it’s hard to get angry/offensive in 140 characters.
Lamenting a little more on this, I think that perhaps one of the ways in which Twitter works for us may reflect something about how we often live our kink as a parallel sort of lifestyle, but not usually as the predominant one – that is to say, our kinky personas usually run alongside everyday vanilla ones. One reason why so many kinky folk do blog/have blogged is to receive feedback; presumably at one stage earlier on they were compelled to acknowledge their kink *outside* of their own heads, and putting things into the public domain is often done in the hope of getting comments and making connections. In this respect, maybe that’s why Twitter works for us – we put an emotion/a feeling/ a situation on there for our carefully-selected friends to see, and by the very nature of the worldwide network present, there will nearly always be somebody awake and reading who wants to respond straight away.
Further, I think the shortness of the Tweets encourages that interaction. As we know, it takes a special skill to reduce things down to 140 characters, and so often people want to know more than can be contained in the original message. Then, the why? when? how? kinds of questions that enable a dialogue to be built come along, and then before you know it you have a whole night of Tweets to catch up with the next morning.
Another thing that makes Twitter so positive for strengthening friendships with is that it allows recurrent themes to become something of an ‘in-joke’ at times, as it were. Whether it is the FS Fruit bat or the buying of train tickets, all of these recurrent themes allow us feel much closer over time, reminding us that we are progressing on our individual journeys together.
For me, this is perhaps one of the most important things that Twitter can offer… certainly, signing in once a month to my vanilla Twitter account became so boring that I haven’t been there since before Christmas – how boring it is to read things that the friends I see everyday have already told me over the phone or at coffee! However, for the secret pervy friends that I don’t see (indeed, I’ve only *met* 5 or 6 of them), it is a much more interesting read to be a part of their lives that I don’t get to hear about over drinks. I think that’s why I spend too much time trying to fit my life into 140s; it gives me a chance to edge closer to a group that I’m still trying to find my place in, but in a situation where the quickness of responses can usually only be encouraging to contribute even more.
Coming at this from the less literary side, as a compiler of choice bits of spanking porn and other people’s spanking blogging, I can say for sure that my blog traffic has been declining steadily for a couple of years and that interaction (comments and emails) is way down.
Obviously some of this may have to do with me having gotten stale and boring.
But I do feel Twitter and Facebook have taken over an enormous amount of the day-to-day “social browsing and communicating” that people used to do. There are also a ton of more efficient high-velocity ways for people to find spanking porn than there used to be (tubes,tumblrs).
Another trend I’m seeing is that people who do start blogs these days often see them as more of a publishing platform (they speak, the world listens) than a social tool. So they are a lot less likely to do things like have a blog roll, or start linked conversations with other bloggers by blogging about what other bloggers say.
I don’t see spanking blogs going away entirely, but it’s not the robust ecosystem is used to be! We’ll remain, I think, but just as part of the supporting infrastructure of the online spanking community.
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