Advice for keeping up activity on a blog: don’t get appendicitis in a country where you barely speak the language at the same time that your newborn baby gets his first major daycare illness.
The fact that you are writing this, and I'm reading it, on Substack is a pretty substantial counterpoint. It's much bigger than the original blogosphere. Add in Medium and it's fair to say that for anyone who wants it, long-form text is massively more available than at any time in the past
I think there's an important distinction between availability and cultural authority/relevance. Just because written/literary text is available doesn't mean that literary text is the primary medium through which a society communicates affect and ideas with itself. Neil Postman, for example, argued that television dethroned long-form text well before the emergence of the "neo-oral" medium of short-form social media posts.
The reference to Postman makes the point. If there was a past golden age of text, it was before most of us were born. And there wasn't. Before TV there was radio. Before radio there was the tabloid press. And the tabloid press was a response to then new phenomenon of mass literacy
The fact that you are writing this, and I'm reading it, on Substack is a pretty substantial counterpoint. It's much bigger than the original blogosphere. Add in Medium and it's fair to say that for anyone who wants it, long-form text is massively more available than at any time in the past
I think there's an important distinction between availability and cultural authority/relevance. Just because written/literary text is available doesn't mean that literary text is the primary medium through which a society communicates affect and ideas with itself. Neil Postman, for example, argued that television dethroned long-form text well before the emergence of the "neo-oral" medium of short-form social media posts.
The reference to Postman makes the point. If there was a past golden age of text, it was before most of us were born. And there wasn't. Before TV there was radio. Before radio there was the tabloid press. And the tabloid press was a response to then new phenomenon of mass literacy