According to my blog host, this is my 4000th blog posting.
My 2000th post was 2012/02/17, and my 3000th post was 2013/05/12 – a span of 450 days, or 2.2 posts per day – while this post is on 2015/01/13, a span, from Post-3000, of 611 days, or 1.6 posts per day.
Evidently, my rate of posting has slowed down. I suppose the cause of such a slowdown is in part utterly obvious: it’s the fact of having experienced cancer (or more specifically, its aftermath) for the last two years.
But… I think it is also a bit of a disillusionment with social media in general. Most strongly, I became substantially unhappy with the facebook: its echo-chamber and epistemic closure aspects, and also the feeling that they “owned” me in some way, viz. the commodification of my online persona. So despite some gratitude to the way it enabled me to stay in touch with far-flung friends and family so easily during the worst of my illness, I have essentially quit the book-of-faces, leaving it only as an abandoned “stub” to enable people to “find” me. Nevertheless, my disillusionment with web-based social media extends up to and includes This Here Blog Thingy™, too, which I obviously haven’t quit but for which I feel some reduced enthusiasm.
What’s it all for? The blog has introduced a sort of discipline into my previously utterly-undisciplined writerly life, but it’s also become one of the chief ways I avoid what I might charitably characterize as my more “authorial” ambitions (novels, poetry, short stories). It’s become a means of self-discipline with respect to writing, sometimes, but just as often it’s evolved into a means of willful procrastination that fails to actually lead to any kind of writing or even to any intelligent or critical reading. I’m not proposing to drop the blog – merely expressing my disappointment with my own failure to “leverage the medium,” as a businessperson might phrase it.