Yesterday, I met up with my fellow-bloggers from While not null (over from Australia, whose splendid initiative it was to meet) and Politics, Economy, Society to chat about the future of blogs and blogging in the current age.
Blogging has gone through several changes since we got started many years ago. In the early years, just about everyone had a blog, but within two years (on average, according to Google), 90% of those blogs had fizzled out. The next phase was the monetisation of blogs, search-engine optimisation. This led to square kilometres of slop being (manually at this stage) produced with the commercial aim of driving online traffic to advertisers.
At the same time, other forms of social media began to expand, elbowing attention away from a form requiring more attention to read and indeed to produce. Blogging began to ebb.
Twitter was originally categorised as a 'microblog'; Facebook moved in that direction when it added status updates. Indeed, I see my own blogging output fell sharply as I signed up for those two. It fell (from 250-300 posts a year to around 170-200 posts a year), but has stayed consistently at that level since around 2014. Since then, I've remained on Facebook but have quit Twitter after Musk deformed it.
My posts today tend to be longer and more considered than in the early days, but over the nearly 20 years since I started, there's a consistent thread running through the blog.
My blog aims to show over time the passage of time. That's the purpose of the 'This time x years ago' feature at the bottom of each post. Searchable memory of ordinary things – how they looked before they changed; the ever-shifting texture of reality. What the railway used to look like, when the snow arrived, what local shops existed, what people drove, how the landscape changed, how a road looked like before all those new houses came. What seems mundane now won't in 2046.
I can now see just how far Poland has progressed since I started blogging, less than three years after joining the EU. Today, I can identify the tipping point at which Poland ceased being a post-communist hardship posting and became a normal country. It was the day I travelled from Warsaw to Kraków in a day and everything worked out fine – November 2014 ('Poland – it works!')
My blog is an authentic voice, increasingly rare on an internet in which so much prose has been professionalised, optimised, monetised or, now, AI-smoothed. My photography is there to prevent the blog becoming merely a diary of opinions. Over the years, thousands of photographs build up a visual record of Warsaw and southern Mazowsze which would be difficult to reconstruct retrospectively.
My old question about 'am I a generalist or specialist' is being settled; over the years a pattern is emerging; the topics I like to write about, those I tend to steer clear of (politics being one).
In an age of AI-generated content, where writing style is becoming samey ("Not this. Not this. Not this. But this. And this is quietly important"), authenticity is all important. Today, synthetic, auto-generated text has led to the collapse of commercially driven blogs. This has cleared the ground for blogging to re-emerge purely on aesthetic, essayistic and archival terms. And this is where this blog fits.
Having been freed from the expectation of being mass-market commerce, I hope that the blog has established its place as a distinct literary and visual format and will survive into the future in the way that radio and cinema survived TV and TV has survived the internet.
Today I noticed that next year, Easter falls on 28 March. This means my Lenten cycle of blog posts will be finished before 1 April, being the 20th anniversary of this blog. The event will be marked with a very special post and a revamp with some new features.
This time last year:
Last evening in shirt sleeves?
This time two years ago:
Anomalous landscapes amid local forest
This time seven years ago:
A change in the weather
This time eight years ago:
Zamek Topacz classic car museum
This time 11 years ago:
Curry comes to Jeziorki
[It didn't stay long. Decor matters!]
This time 13 years ago:
Why we should all try to use less gas
This time 13 years ago:
Polish supermarket chain advertises on London buses
This time 18 years ago:
Well-shot pheasants
Posts
4 comments:
I hope to keep blogging until I die, or in the programming speak - 'while not null'. Cheers Michael for the write up of our meeting! It's great to meet people IRL. Till next time. Tom
Very well reflected, and I'm glad your blog exists. I read it since ca 2015, and can truly say that you are an excellent chronicler of the area between Warszawa and Piaseczno. And this area really has changed significantly!
Many thanks for your kind words Bernd!
Blogging as consistently as you do is quite an achievement. All power to your elbow and long may you continue. The blog is mightier than the twit.
Gotta say I abandoned Twittering even before Musk took over because various exchanges were getting quite confrontational. The platform started out as quite a valuable resource, especially when it came to breaking news stories which appeared before the main channels/outlets picked them up, but gradually the whole thing deteriorated into a verbal slugfest, which was no longer any fun.
Best wishes from Karski
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