Whither blogging?

At the beginning of Love of All Wisdom’s tenth-anniversary post, I wrote: “In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity.” Immediately after the post went up, a thought occurred to me, which would probably have made that point even more effectively. Namely: does anyone even say “blogosphere” anymore?

I haven’t heard anyone use the phrase “blogosphere” in a long time. That in itself is no problem: neologisms come and go. More concerning is the reason it isn’t used: the referent of the term “blogosphere” has faded from view, and may not even exist at all. Circa 2010, even though I didn’t yet identify as a Buddhist, I was still in dialogue with a “Buddhist blogosphere” that contained the likes of the Bitterroot Badger and Marcus. That is, there was a network of many Buddhist blogs whose authors read each other’s. But most of those blogs are gone now, and I haven’t seen others come up to replace them.

This isn’t a coincidence. In the ’00s, when I started Love of All Wisdom, blogging was an exciting new technology – but no technology stays new and exciting for long. Already at educational-technology conferences around 2012 I was hearing people disparaging blogging as “old tech”. (I replied “What’s wrong with old tech?” But in those days edtech was too often about getting dazzled by the latest shiny thing.) It feels hard to believe now, but as Twitter started getting popular – around the same time – one of the most common terms to describe it was “microblogging”. That is, in order to explain and understood what Twitter was, people thought of it as “like blogging, but shorter”.

What happened next, of course, was that the immediacy and ease of Facebook and Twitter drove blogs to the sidelines. The positive side effect of this development was that, where blogs had been viewed as frivolous ephemera in the ’00s, in the ’10s they became a site for serious reflection by comparison. By 2012, if you had a quick and goofy hot take, you no longer needed a blog for that; you had Facebook and Twitter. Blogs, by contrast, had become a space left for serious essays. The problem, though, was that people seemed to have less attention span for that serious long-form reflection. Facebook was enough. And so, it seemed, the world came to pass blogs by. They came to seem like a relic of an earlier time.

And yet. Technology’s moving-on didn’t stop with Facebook and Twitter. Young people across the generations want to have places to interact without their parents and teachers watching, and they come to find such places in the newer technologies the parents hasn’t found. That had already been true for me and my friends in the 1990s when we started an email list together, and it remains so: once parent-age people like me got established on Facebook and Twitter, the young quickly moved on to Instagram. Now that we’re on Instagram, they’re moving to TikTok. (And to Snapchat, where they can wisely keep all their naughtiness away from the eyes of posterity.)

As for us adults, in the mid-’00s, especially around 2016, most of us came to discover just how toxic the culture on Facebook and Twitter could become. Twitter’s length restriction – without which it would not be Twitter – makes serious reflection impossible; Facebook’s algorithm actively promotes hostile interactions and delivers users to conspiracy theories. Even though the written word is a medium I prefer over pictures, I moved most of my own social media presence from Facebook to Instagram, because it turns out that the pictures were more likely to be wholesome and positive. If you must have the fast interactions of social media, better they be smarm than snark.

And in the past few years there has come a particularly interesting twist. Out of the angry social-media culture of Twitter and Tumblr arose a left-wing movement, focused on racial and gender issues, which has become the ruling tendency in mainstream journalism and is not very comfortable with opinions that dissent from it. Those who do dissent openly have often found it difficult to continue their work in established journalistic venues. For example Matthew Yglesias left the publication he founded because his coworkers there said his disagreement with them made them feel “unsafe”; Glenn Greenwald left the publication he founded because it insisted on censoring his criticism of Joe Biden during the election; Bari Weiss left the New York Times when her colleagues reacted to her dissenting opinions by calling her a Nazi and posting an ax emoji next to her name. Notably, none of these were even remotely close to the far right or to Trump; Yglesias is of the centre-left, Weiss of the centre-right, and Greenwald an unrepentant socialist.

But these various pressures against non-conforming opinions created an opportunity: in 2021 it all led to the runaway success of a new platform called Substack, which now effectively employs Yglesias, Greenwald and Weiss. Substack is a way to distribute paid newsletters, in the retro-seeming format of email distribution, and these thinkers (among several others) have made now themselves a comfortable living as independent writers, outside environments hostile to them. Substack has been growing rapidly at a time when journalism as a field is notoriously struggling. Its success even spilled back over to the mainstream media: John McWhorter, a linguist whose centrist views on race put him at odds with New York Times orthodoxy, had a Substack so successful that the Times eventually hired him as an opinion columnist.

And here’s the thing: what comes out of the shiny new technology of Substack looks a lot like… blogging! What I receive in Yglesias’s Substack email newsletter – long, informed takes on a variety of issues – would all look comfortably in place on a scholarly blog. Technologically, I’ve heard Substack described (accurately, I think) as simply “WordPress with a payment platform” – WordPress being the versatile blogging software which has always powered Love of All Wisdom and the Indian Philosophy Blog (and which now powers a large number of non-blog websites). So the exciting buzzworthy new startup of 2021 turned out to be about – blogging, via email. Blogs are alive and well today, when we call them newsletters.

I very briefly entertained the thought of moving my writing to Substack to be where the cool kids are, but there was no real reason for me to do so. Blogs retain one key advantage over Substack, which is the community that forms around a reasonably moderated comments section; there are interactions here that could not happen in an email distribution service. Moreover, I’ve never expected to get paid for my writing. I started Love of All Wisdom during a period of career transition, so I gave it a .com domain in case there was ever some way of making money from it, but I didn’t expect that then, and I know it’s not going to be the case now. By all accounts, Substack writers do not come remotely close to making a living on their work if they are not as famous as Yglesias or Weiss.

But Substack didn’t just take off because of the money. From a reader’s perspective – aside from the obvious pent-up need to hear dissenting voices! – an advantage of Substack is that its posts get pushed to that other now-hoary technology known as email. Blogs are generally viewed as something that exists on the web, such that you have to go to the blog’s website to read it. There’s an advantage to that view with respect to old posts; many many people have found Love of All Wisdom on the web with Google searches about Asperger’s syndrome and philosophy or the difference between modernity and modernism. But only a real die-hard is likely to remember to actively visit a website every two weeks to find the new posts. Substack gained its success by sending its posts to you.

Luckily, WordPress can do that too! It requires a little technical work – Google killed the FeedBurner tool that I used to do it with, and the replacement tool was buggy for the first few weeks – but WordPress is quite capable of email distribution with the right plugins, and that is the case here. The sidebars on Love of All Wisdom and the Indian Philosophy Blog each have an option where you can enter your email address to sign up to receive new posts as they come out. Instantly, a blog becomes a newsletter. (If you prefer; it can also still remain a blog, from which you receive updates by old-fashioned means like Facebook and Twitter.) If you want to get newsletter-style email updates from multiple blogs and manage them in one place, there’s also a site called follow.it that will let you do that.

So I end this post with an advertisement of sorts: if you like the posts on LoAW and/or the IPB and you’re not already getting them in your email, why not go to the sidebar(s) and sign up for them? It turns out blogging is cool again when you receive the posts by email. And if you were already receiving these blogs’ posts by email, well, I guess you’re ahead of the curve.

Cross-posted on Love of All Wisdom.

5 Replies to “Whither blogging?”

  1. Yeah, though it could be because current language is often dictated by the MSM and/or whatever music happens to be popular on any given day that terms (not just “blogosphere” which is outside the parameters of either news agencies or musicians’ lyrics) rather than a major shift away from using blogs in general. I remember watching a video from a few years ago where someone was challenging Rajiv Malhotra and he used the word “listserve” which I had never heard of before and which appears to have been a relic of late 90s/early 2000s. I also noticed Nous’ site looks rather dated compared to Michael Huemer’s fakenous which may or may not be “up-to-date” in terms of design. I try to check this site regularly so I don’t need to sign up for email alerts, but I understand why others might utilize that option.

    • Malhotra was almost certainly referring to RISA-L (which I guess just became SARI-L), and which has regularly pissed him off by taking a critical perspective on various Indian traditions. It was started in the late ’90s/early ’00s but continues to be a major forum for scholars of Indian religions. I suppose the term “listserv” has fallen out of fashion, but what it names – an email distribution list that members of the list can respond to and have it sent, akin to a Google Group – is alive and well.

      • I’ve noticed Malhotra has gotten into the AI thing, better late than never I guess, but he seems to have only a surface level understanding of it, asking mundane questions like if AI will make us “lazier”, which it has in many ways no doubt done, but he avoids the “deeper” questions people like John Basl tackle, etc. Hindu Students Council takes after a lot of his ideas and will repeat his writings verbatim. On the one hand he is making a lot of these issues known to a wide audience but at the same time I wonder how much he actually understands…..

          • Well these young kids are most likely upper middle class or upper class anyway so no need for his money, but he seems to dip into too many rivers, including MSNBC’s race panel, which never makes anyone look intelligent. He also visited Nithyananda’s “country” within the past couple years which kills any credibility he has as a scholar and devotee. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone cite Doniger except one or two people and so her influence is ironically due in part to his overexaggerating it in academia.

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