For 10 years, I maintained a blog. This was back in the heyday of blogs. What did we call it back then? Web 2.0? Of course, the idea of user generated content populating the internet felt both exciting and Sisyphean. The phrase, “Hold on! Someone just said something wrong on the internet!” comes to mind. Will our own little corner of the unfathomably large “internet” ever mean something broader? Ask that of a social media influencer to get a very different answer from my experience with blogging.
I ended that blog back in 2015 after starting a new job where I wasn’t sure my private observations about research, writing, and teaching would serve me well. I was also tired of maintaining a pace of 15 posts a month and gaining almost no consistent visitors. Not that I wrote with a sense of an audience, but more consistent readers would have meant a greater sense of obligation.
But now I ask, what did I lose by stopping that writing? As much as I needed to write in the research roles I’ve had since, I’ve never had a position where I needed to write consistently about deep topics. The result is that my writing now is slower.
More than that, my biggest takeaway after 8 years away from consistent writing is that my thinking has changed. Of course, we must think to write. Organizing words, sentences, paragraphs, topics into a coherent narrative is an engaging intellectual task. When teaching writing, I observed that the student who turns in a bad paper usually has disorganized thoughts to go with it. If they can’t think about their topic, how can they write about it?
But the reverse is also true: Writing about something helps us think about it. Having a platform that called for me to express my views in an organized way and in a longer form allowed me to process a variety of issues, from research to teaching, current events, technology, and beyond. A post may have ended on the conclusion I determined in advance, but I was often surprised by the path that took me there. This was writing shaping my thinking.
I’m still not sold on the value of a professional website or a blog. A line from the TV show 30 Rock comes to mind: “Technology is cyclical.” That idea is obviously absurd. There are almost no examples of something popular ages ago coming back into fashion. (Vinyl comes to mind as an exception, but even that is debatable. Did it ever go away? Is it actually back?) Yet here I am thinking, “If someone wants to see how I think, they should look to my writing.” Writing is how I figure out what I think and how to think.
We’ll see how much attention I end up paying to this new site. My purpose is plain: Professional representation to aid my career. And this blog is meant in service to that goal. With luck, this venue may spark a bit of the passion I used to have for blogging.
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