One of the negative trends I see today is regular personal blogging getting more and more neglected by our generation. Microblogging is the new hot thing today: posting and reading Twitter and Facebook updates are taking away most of our attention on the Web.
While microblogging has its advantages and purposes of providing speed and ease of use and giving people less pressure to publish thoughts and information online, I think regular personal blogging is very important due to the following reasons:
1. Blogging forces us to analyze and think deeply.
2. Blogging provides us with a space on the Web that is relatively free of distractions.
3. Blogging encourages independent thinking and writing, as opposed to getting into the habit of mostly bouncing off and retweeting other people’s comments.
4. Blogging can improve our writing skills. Posting short updates usually does not.
5. Regular blogging can become a healthy habit. Solely microblogging can become like eating fast food.
Now don’t get me wrong: I think microblogging is highly essential to the world today, which was meaningfully exemplified by events like the Iran protests. On my part, in order to participate in microblogging, I try to tweet every day.
On the other hand, I haven’t been blogging seriously until yesterday, so some of you may think that I don’t deserve to put up a post called “Blogging shouldn’t be neglected.” I have certainly neglected blogging until recently. So, the list above is really for myself.
“Your blog is your mothership” – Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress
I have noticed that teenagers and young adults nowadays tend to participate more actively in microblogging, while their own blogs become more static over time. Of course, the nature of both mediums inevitably leads to such trends, but regular and thoughtful blogging shouldn’t be ignored nevertheless.
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