before unabashedly navel-gazing facebook status updates dominated the social networking universe, there were these things called blogs. before that, people penned (literally, or penciled) their experiences into journals and diaries. i hazard to say that facebook is slowly deteriorating our attention spans, mostly because i don’t honestly believe it. perhaps we’re developing a more finely honed awareness of the economy of language required by a status update – or by these gaudy squawks cutely and colloquially referred to as tweets – i don’t know.
undoubtedly there are those individuals who can bend the medium of the status update to creative ends, seizing hold of fleeting popular media, and inking an intriguing commentary about gratuitously narcissistic cultural lifestyles. in the end, though, i truly don’t care how you scored, percentage-wise, on a quiz about how well you know another friend, what decade you should have been born in, or how tasty your zesty sandwich was that you inhaled for lunch.
to take it one step further, what’s next for the evolutionary machine lovingly labeled social networking? if we have traversed in imparting our experiences from handwritten diaries and journals to typed diaries and journals to online diaries and journals (a.k.a. blogs) to myspace to facebook to twitter, what’s next?
while pondering these questions and reminiscing about the online universe before the one- or two-sentence status update, i realized that i missed the narratives – my own and others’ – that i enjoyed writing and reading in a blogging atmosphere. as a follow up, i checked in on other friends’ blogs i had ignored for the past several months. it arrived as no surprise that these blogs had received the same fate as my own, all neglected and dormant since the glory days of 2007, perhaps 2008. where are you, let all go, with your compellingly fascinating spin on life? and how about spider wisdom, one of the most incisively brilliant examples of prose crawling on the web? and star kitten? gone? just like that? i count myself complicit in this cadre of forlorn environments – where are you, m.d.?
so here ends a narrative about a lack of narratives, which i write in an attempt to resuscitate this forgotten online reflective space and offer more narratives. i’m not making any promises, however. thanks for reading. see you on facebook.
xo,
m.d.
