Whatever happened to blogging?

Yes, I'm still here, and — importantly — you're still here. But generally, I'm told, what was once blogging has migrated to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. The mommy bloggers, specifically, moved on to Instagram, so it says here in "How the Mom Internet became a spotless, sponsored void/Gritty blogs have given way to staged Instagram photos" (WaPo).

If you read that, you'll see that mommy blogging had already gotten screwed up by the effort to monetize. There are various ways to monetize your blog, but the most lucrative approach — especially available to bloggers with subject matter that connects to specific commercial products — is to write posts that incorporate the product.

So, instead of writing about your child and showing him eating a cookie, you get the kid to eat the sponsor's cookie and your post is a photo of the kid looking cute with the cookie and you saying something bloggy but phony about the cookie. Ptui.

But it's not just the monetization. It's also the insipid trend toward prettification and the commodification of one's own life. On Instagram and Facebook, many people — notably women with little kids at their disposal — present themselves and their lives as beautiful. There is a craving and genuine appreciation for beauty in human life, but a constant barrage of shallow, self-directed, predictable beauty cannot really satisfy the craving.

It may be that nothing on line can or should give us what we really want. Take a quick look at that fantasy of a wholesome woman with a cute baby in a well-kept kitchen, and know that it's the equivalent of eating a cupcake, looking at a few minutes of porn, or reading the new spiritual uplift from your faith adviser Burns Strider, and get on with your real life.

I like this from the comments at WaPo:

I see a distinct correlation between these curated social postings of moms today and the TV advertisements in the 1960s where women were shown in nice clothing attire and styled hair as they talked about the product they were using to make their homes spotless. The floors, walls, counters, kitchens, bathrooms were all shown in shining cleanliness.

Those old commercials became a joke, even back then, and advertisers had to find other ways, such as this one:



There's a danger now that any return to "grittiness" will be just as commercial and maybe even less sincere than the over-prettification that infects us today.

And by the way, maybe Barack Obama was too glossily beautiful and that's how we developed a taste for Trump.

So, yeah... whatever happened to blogging? It's just a place to write. You can write whatever you want, not necessarily about yourself. You might get some readers and give them a place to talk, not necessarily about themselves. And you can put up pictures. Most people will get sucked into pictures, and you as a writer might get overwhelmed by your pictures and never find your way back to writing about anything but your life in pictures. But if you're lucky enough to live in the real world, one day that baby is old enough to say "quit taking my picture."