An Amateur’s Take on The Future of Blogging
Discretion is advised — my thoughts are purely my own and based on my own tortuous love affair with blogging.
Oh, blogging my old friend. I have a love/hate relationship with blogging. Mostly because as a journalism major, I’ve had to blog for most of my classes since freshman year. It’s not that I don’t like the application of it — it’s more of the rebellious nature of hating something you’re forced to do.
I wouldn’t call myself a blogger extraordinaire or even an avid blogger, but I do know my way around some blogging sites. I’ve primarily used Wordpress, which is one of the more popular blogging sites. It transcends just the blogging medium and allows users to customize the site to suit other purposes — like a portfolio or personal website. A blog on Wordpress can become more than what is written.
Wix is similar in that I think it is the best (free) format for a nice portfolio. The free templates are easy and customizable. I was able to create my online portfolio easily and could incorporate a blog into it as well. There wasn’t much customization allowed with the blog because it needed to fit into the parameters of the site I had created for my portfolio, but the blog is a secondary piece to overall impression.
Coming into this class, I had never heard of Medium, and I was excited to learn how to use it because of my experience and frustrations with the other sites. I like the simplicity of the site and the overall aesthetic, and I think the reason I like that part of Medium is because it doesn’t try to multiple things at once.
Medium is like a stream of consciousness, with various voices contributing to an overarching buzz. Just like Twitter, you can cater what you want to see in your feed to what you follow like in tags or in people. Posting is easy because that’s all you do — you write, you add a photo or a video and then you publish. There isn’t much reworking to make it look a certain way because each post looks pretty much the same.
While that might detract some people from using the site, in terms of just blogging, I would use Medium over any of the other sites. Customization and colors and themes are great, but if you’re trying to establish a voice, using Medium is the best way for that to come through because it isn’t bogged down by the frills.
This stream of consciousness on Medium is nice because it caters to its audience. You can customize your feed through tags so while I’m really interested in learning more about the refugee crisis, someone else might be more interested in Donald Trump’s latest antics.
The multitude of voices on Medium is another asset. From official sources, like Amnesty International and Barack Obama, to a graduating senior blogging for class, coverage is wide and comprehensive.
Yet, as someone hoping to pursue digital media as a career, I often wonder about the shelf-life of ventures such as Medium. Someone once told me that now is the right time to be in podcast because people are throwing money at them. I feel like that is similar to blogging.
Because the internet and the digital age are still relatively new, especially with the latest craze of the “new frontier”, I’ve found the future of blogging to be dependent upon our attention spans. Now that’s not to say that blogging will become obsolete. I just think it’s going to shift around, and part of that shift will be dependent on how people consume content.
Already you can see a shift away from the traditional form of blogging in the sense of just written content. More and more people are experimenting with different formats such as “vlogs” and even virtual reality. So the notion of the message being as prevalent as the medium because of how the information is disseminated counts, especially in terms of the longevity of blogging.
Shifts in how people engage with content is shown throughout the history of technological advancements. From the printing press to the telegraph to radio to television to the internet, information is staying the same but the way it is processed is changing. Therefore, blogs aren’t necessarily going to go away; it will just be figuring out what they are going to transform into.
This is complicated in terms of Medium because while I don’t see the written “traditional” form of blogging surviving in its current context, I do find the notion of stream of consciousness interesting and compelling. As explained by Robin Sloan, “Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.”
So while Madrigal critics the stream in her article for the Atlantic, I think the combination of the stream mixed with some of the more durable stock found in Medium posts will make it last for the time being.
I have hard time projecting what I think will happen with Medium or blogging in general because as previously stated there is this constant shift to adapt and evolve. Look at BuzzFeed and Upworthy for example. While those are organizations, they do have a blog-esque kind of feel to them. They are destinations where information is passed around at a casual level.
So for me, the future of Medium is reliant on the future of the digital world. How are things going to shift and to what? What will the emphasis be on?
