The last post on this blog was nearly 2 months ago, a lot has occurred since the summer and I've once in a while wondered why have I not been writing as much as I had used to.
I started writing a blog nearly 10 years ago, I still remember the motivation that had me begin writing so many years ago; an essayist by the name of Paul Graham had inspired me by his written articulation to explore the world well written expression of thought. Those writings would inspire me to become a better debater and writer where I would receive top grade in an APSC 261 course entitled "Technology and Society." I would also learn that good writing is paramount for writing good project proposals and application letters, a skill that would also help me get accepted into the Japanese Government Mombusho Scholarship program and find my way to Japan and other students that I helped in writing their application forms for international scholarships and I would end up help sending 2 students to study in foreign countries.
This was all before the era of Facebook and the rise of social networking and the nature of online communication has changed.
I have found myself spending more time on Facebook as a medium communication, it's where most of my friends are and how I keep track of friends around the world. I have about 800 connections, of which, I can say about a few hundred are people that I would like to stay in close contact with, but even with those numbers, it is hard to stay in contact with that many friends. I only have so much memory capacity and it is much easier to have an automatic system that shows me a series of posts from a variety of friends on what they're up to.
But the issue is the shift in online medium, from blog posts to short "status updates," captioned photos and albums or tweets-- the online medium of online communication has changed from paragraph form to short one liners. I am not sure if this is for better or worse, but I have realized that my posting frequency here has dramatically declined compared to the times of before (that and the new work place blocks access to blogger).
But I do wonder, if the medium of current social working sites is somehow dumbing down the level of discourse or whether if it had made posting more accessible to people with to short one line thoughts (or a reduction in original thought through posting of links to articles instead of personal essays).
But there is more, no doubt.
With the advent of Facebook and the lack of portability of data does have me somewhat concerned on my ability to backup content and the ability to consolidate my online presence into a single site instead of simply using a provided platform. People have blogs, their Facebook page, a twitter account and more and we are limited to posting content formatted to the type of medium that we are posting to. I sometimes wonder if that is the right approach, but the way we communicate is obviously impacted by the popularity of the medium (even with all of its flaws). And on an interesting note, this also applies to financial trading too as people like to trade on the largest markets and the design of those platforms can impact the way people do transactions.
Will there be a way to consolidate one's online presence to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linked in and etc into a single page? I am not sure, but even if it is only some of those services together, it would seem like something useful to me and it would stop the exodus of people from blogging.
