Why I Don’t Blog Anymore.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and how best to say it without coming off like a complete doucher.

I guess it all started when I got 2-3 comments every single day from nut jobs who thought it was prudent to talk negatively about my life and family in the comments of this blog. Saying nasty things to my face is one thing. Saying them anonymously behind a veiled curtain is a pansy mood.

That was the basis for me being turned of to the medium.

But ultimately it had to do with me feeling like I had nothing else to say. For so long blogging and podcasting were a medium for me to explore and tease out my thoughts on the world and my context. It was a breeding ground for good ideas and bad ideas. Successful experiments and failed experiments. It was a depository for developmental thought. And it was quite helpful. I started blogging in 2002. Before there was MySpace. Before there was Facebook. Before there was even WordPress. My only option was Blogger. So blogging for all those years before it was the monster that its become now I got to really appreciate the platform and medium for what it was . . . namely a microphone and voice for those who did not have a voice in the traditional media.

Myself and others like me, despite our lack of qualifications were able to stand on the same platform as those who controlled and represented the traditional media. For good and bad this was something fresh, exciting, and needed in media. We didn’t always use our voices for good and sometimes end up being spoiled little pricks in the sandbox throwing dirt at anything that pissed us off. But at least we were in the sandbox. It was an exciting and helpful time. And even in our deconstruction there was quite a bit of contruction going on.

Then something happen. It’s inevitable I suppose. And it only makes you sound like an arrogant prick to bring it up . . . but blogging got cool. And when it did it quit being a voice for those on the outside. It became another tool for those at the top and the middle to further perpetuate the same vanities and power structures that existed before. No longer was it a creative place but it was a marketed place. Shaquille O’Neil got a Twitter account. Pastors and conferences started blogs on their websites. CNN and all the other networks changed the window dressing on the titles of their reporters from journalists to bloggers hoping we would think they were cool.

Irony of all ironies, the medium took off. Everybody and their mom started blogging. And it quit being a place for discussion and imagination and devolved into a place of two extremes . . . a place where people talk(ed) about what they ate for breakfast. And a place where people who didn’t understand the foundation of the medium took it over for their own gain, profit, and popularity.

It was no longer the medium for the margins but the medium for the socially elite and their fanboys.

The only thing worse was that simultaneously all other sorts of contradictions were starting to make themselves apparent. Pastors of megachurches with weekly electricity bill in the thousands and thousands of dollars and million dollar renovations were talking about “Creation Care” and “green living”. Ultra reformed people began talking about how much we needed to engage with this “new culture” despite them thinking they were big piles of shit in God’s eyes. And everybody began contradicting each other and themselves at a more rapid pace.

I was and am not immune to this no matter how much I try to be. I went from being a freelance graphic designer practicing sustainability in my business to realizing that 75% of the clients I had were the same people that I believe to be perpetuating the very same ironies and contradictions that I was bemoaning.

And in that state of mind, I got tired of it all. I am still tired of it all. I don’t feel like there is much left that I have to say in this forum. Despite still thinking, dreaming, and processing things. My blog and podcast which were invested with so much of my time, energies, thoughts, passions . . . so much of me . . . now only remind me way too much of the sheer superficiality of trends and fads.

I no doubt realize that they were helpful forums to me. And from the emails and calls I still get to this day, to other people. Yet the whole time periods of 7 years leaves me indifferent to it. So I thought once and for all I’d answer the emails and questions and phone calls that were curious about my silence.

Bottom line . . . I got tired of saying the same thing. Only to a changing audience. I don’t want to invest to much meaning into the work of early bloggers . . . but in many ways I think it carried with it a certain degree of prophetic critique. Whether my words had any type of prophetic voice remains to be seen . . . but I for one got tired of assuming the role of a prophet to a world drunk on its own trends and entertainment. This is not to say that I don’t think that I can still offer a voice or a life that is prophetic in nature and tone. I just no longer believe that for me, it is a vehicle in achieving that end.

It is what it is folks. An empire run now by megachurch pastors and book publishers. There are still some great bloggers out there who are carrying the torch high and making myself and others think . . . Julie . . . Ariah . . . Bob . . . Ryan . . . but as a whole, the rest as turned into meaningless drivel. And I for one was tired of driveling.