The Blog is Dead . . . Long live the Blog

Christianity Today has posted an article explaining that the blogging phenomenon has peaked. There are not enough new bloggers to replace the bloggers who are stepping away from their blogs. Why are so many people leaving? According to CT, while many Christian blogs are quite good,

What tired bloggers are increasingly discovering, however, is that it's not necessarily the quality of their blog posts that matter. It's matching their quality with frequency.

And I think that’s absolutely true. As a tired blogger myself, I find it very rewarding to do a good quality post, but unless I’m posting at least twice a day no one is going to read it. That defeats the purpose. I might as well just yell my opinions out to myself while driving in my car, which is what I was doing before blogging (OK, I still do it).

This constant demand for updates forces bloggers to lower the quality of their work. CT quotes Alan Jacobs on the sorry state of the blogosphere, “Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.” I think that is exactly right.

Thinking actually takes time. A typical post for me, which involves research, writing, and tagging might take up to an hour or more. Sometimes the research is just that involved. Most times I’ll end up rewriting a post several times just to make sure I’m getting my point across and I’m not saying anything I didn’t mean to say. Once the post is out there, someone might misinterpret what I’m saying, and then I have a pointless debate on my hands (I like debates, but let’s be clear, there are people out there who spend more time commenting on other people’s blogs than they spend writing for their own blogs).

Take, for example, the “recent” post, Evangelical Entrepreneurship. I spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon trying to make sure I worded the post correctly. I even had to take a break for dinner! The subject matter was just that difficult, for me anyway. Obviously, I can’t spend every afternoon just writing for my blog. I have a job. I have a life.

A good post is like a Thanksgiving dinner, it takes longer to cook than it takes to eat. Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down after that. After dinner, you are no longer hungry. But after reading a good post, you want more and more. That just puts more pressure on the blogger and either quality suffers, or the blogger just gives up.

The blogosphere could be so much more, if only we rewarded quality instead of quantity.

–J.E. Heath
per-fidem.org

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