Remember blogging? That quaint, old-fashioned hobby of keeping a regular, text-based online journal about your life and interests? Remember how blogs used to allow reader comments, and were archived in reverse-date order?
It was my friend’s younger brother who first introduced me to blogging in 2004, writing the Blogger URL on a paper napkin at a party. He and his friends formed the nucleus of my new online community.
But as I settle into my porch rocking chair 10 years later, tucking my crocheted rug a little more snugly around my withered old legs, I don’t even have to yell at the Kids of Today to get off my lawn. They don’t blog anymore.
Indeed, most of the personal blogs I once followed have vanished, or haven’t been updated in months or years. The blogroll in my sidebar reads like an honour roll of war dead. But I keep on blogging because, compared to tweeting for thousands of followers or posting to hundreds of Facebook friends, the single-digit pageviews my blog now attracts are a paradoxically private way to express myself.
The melancholy ruins of this digital Pompeii recall The Onion’s joke about internet archaeologists excavating the lost "Friendster" civilisation. But just as Friendster users migrated to MySpace and then to Facebook, teenagers are now fleeing Facebook to get away from their embarrassing older relatives.
So, where should we go nowadays for an instant hit of youthiness? WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tumblr, Instagram and Vine.
These platforms offer instant interaction and fun, emotional moments. Young people hang out there as extensions of their real-life friendships – or to behave as if strangers are their friends.
Speaking about her recent book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, technology researcher Danah Boyd notes what’s changed since her own freaky and geeky mid-1990s teen years: “The teenagers who are growing up with technology today aren’t like my peer group … this is part of the mainstream now.”
It’s normal. What adults can mistake for narcissism – performing one’s intimate self as thoughtless, obnoxious "selfies" – is just kids larking about for their mates. And rather than making themselves vulnerable, teenagers are compensating for an overprotective parenting culture that increasingly constrains them from seeing their friends in person.
Teenagers do care about privacy – privacy from surveillance. Recent research at University College London suggests that teenagers will quit Facebook as soon as their parents send them a friend request. Chat-based social networks offer an evanescent space where private conversations and silly moments will be safely lost in a stream rather than archived forever. After all, with peer cruelty only amplified by today’s heightened connectivity, why would you help out potential tormentors by creating a handy blog they can easily browse to humiliate you?
Blogging persists, of course. But it’s mostly for adults – professionalised to the point where the old "bloggers vs journalists" debates now seem hopelessly quaint. Maintaining a personal blog has become entrepreneurial: a job that earns an income through display advertising, network marketing, ebooks and blog-to-book deals.
Concomitantly, blogging has indelibly influenced mainstream news reporting, which is now much more immediate, informal, link-rich and inclusive of reader comments. When I taught online journalism at Monash University from 2009-11, students published their assignments on WordPress blogs.
So for young people, blogs are work, not play. A 2008 Pew research project found that while 85% of 12 to 17-year-olds engaged in electronic personal communication (including texting, email, instant messaging and commenting on social media), 60% didn’t consider these texts to be "writing". Another study in 2013 revealed that teenagers still distinguish between the "proper" writing they do for school (which may be on blogs) and their informal, social communication.
By contrast, my fondness for prose – and my disgusted CLOSE TAB when an interesting link turns out to be, ugh, a video – marks me as a digital fogey. I didn’t get Tumblr for the longest time. Why were people just reblogging other people’s posts?
A 2012 Israeli study found that teenagers suffering from social anxiety and distress could derive significant psychological benefits from writing about personal problems on a public blog with a comment section. But as therapy this is desperately daggy, in the same well-meaning way school counsellors can be. It makes the false assumption that when today’s youth turn to the internet, they turn to polished prose.
From another perspective, it’s a dreary slog to articulate your innermost feelings in essay form. Tumblr expresses emotions through images and animations rather than words and ideas: you curate without creating, and express yourself without being articulate.
However, today’s high-schoolers still seek the same sense of community, solidarity and friendship from their online socialising use that I once found in my blogging circle. We all want to to share moments from our everyday lives, and to feel close to others – even if it’s by leaving daft comments on celebrities’ Instagram photos.
We all want to feel we’re being creative, declaring that we exist and our thoughts and feelings matter. Some might say it in a Snapchat. I’ll keep bashing the keyboard to update my lonely, uncool blog.