I am one of those people that hasn’t been very far from a computer since the world wide web became mainstream in the 1990’s. I absorbed everything I could for a time and then, of course, launched my own web site. Looking back on this site I think today it would be called a news aggregator blog. I updated it at least once a day, but quite often I would just update it whenever I found a link that I believed would be of interest to my readers (the British Columbia soccer community). Sometimes I would post my own commentary or commentary from people who emailed there thoughts are particularly topics. By 2005 I had passed on the responsibility for this website to a co-collaborator who continues to run it today.
However, I have never actually sat down and poured out content in a daily blog the way Andrew Sullivan described it in 2008. So this is very new. In some ways I’m intimidated by posting my personal take on things for everyone to see. I encounter this regularly when participating in chat forums. I’ll find something that I want to comment on, write a quite substantial post, and then just delete it. It’s a habit that became a huge waste of time for me. I would become consumed with the feeling that “no one could possibly want to read what I’ve got say” or “these people are never going to understand my point of view.” I have also become discouraged from continuing to post after posting something I believed to be interesting and NO ONE comments, either positively or negatively.
But I think things should be different in this environment. For instance, on a forum you are really imposing your views on a topic. People that are part of that forum should expect all kinds of opinions but at the same time they are not necessarily looking for YOUR opinion. On the other hand, anyone that reads this blog will be expecting to see my take on things… in this case on the topic of “social media”… and if they aren’t interested in the topic or in my opinion then they wouldn’t be reading it.
Perhaps McLuhan’s idea about the medium being the message for the reader also works for the writer? That is the medium for which you are writing is more important than the content of that writing?