Why Blogs Are (Still) Important

As we enter the new year, and everyone is making resolutions and planning out what they'd like to do and who they'd like to become this year, I thought it'd be a good time to publish this post, which has been in my drafts for a while! Just in case you were thinking about stopping blogging...you shouldn't. :) Happy New Year!

I was thinking a bit ago, sparked by a conversation with my dad, about why I blog. Why blogs are still around, even if the blogosphere has died slightly. 

Sometimes it seems like the whole world has switched to social media. Because I am a bit of a weirdo, I sometimes read either defunct blogs or the extremely archives of modern "blogs" (only posted to a couple of times a year) by Catholic bloggers, especially moms. (I love birth stories. Sue me.) From that occasional pursuit, I know there was a heyday of blogging in the early 2000s, maybe even up until the early 2010s. (My mom had a blog. I cannot for the life of me picture her blogging anymore.) But these days, most of those are not kept up anymore, because the people who blogged there are now on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. 

The major difference, in my opinion?

The character limit, and the social pressures which go with it.

Instagram: 2200 characters
Twitter: 280 characters

(Facebook does allow longer posts, but it's more of a "dying social media" at this point, the domain of older people. And this is not even taking into account Snapchat, which barely allows for words at all.) 

Even within that character limit, especially on Instagram, a lot of the time people will just keep scrolling and not take the time to stop and read a longer caption. People try to distill, to put as much as possible into as little space as possible. Attention spans are shorter, and people want to capture that attention before it's gone--maybe in just a few seconds. 

But the thing is, there's only so much you can distill something before it loses something. There are many merits to writing longer pieces--clarity, less likelihood of being misunderstood, a broader understanding and exploration, &c. 

And even better, bloggers are keeping up a long tradition.

When you blog (or when you read a blog), you are supporting the continuation of the history of essays.

*covers ears from magnitude of the groans*

Wait, guys! Before you leave, suffering from a resurgence of PTSD from the number of essays you had to write for high school (and/or college)...I'm not talking about the five-paragraph, bore-your-socks off, die-whenever-you-try-to-write-one essays. (or rather, bore-your-socks-off except if you're Eomer, who managed to turn a five-paragraph essay into an entire ROAST of Walden, and I'm still not over it) (and no, he did not get a good grade XD)

(Although to be fair, those kinds of essays are excellent practice for both blogging and college writing, and I am super grateful to my high school literature teacher who taught me the practices of excising "to be" verbs, considering sentence openers, structuring things correctly, and writing introductions and conclusions, aka my nemeses.) 

No. I'm talking about essays in the tradition of Chesterton. He wrote over 7,000 essays in his lifetime, which according to Fr. DD, meant that for a lot of his adult life, he was writing one most days. These were often originally published by newspapers, and they weren't just your run-of-the-mill editorials, or the kind of essays you'd see nowadays. They attacked aspects of modern life. They critiqued his contemporaries. They talked about books &c, whether by modern authors or by ones deceased. They brought up complicated matters of theology. They were defenses. Oh, and they were absolutely brilliant, often flipping ideas on their heads, turning things inside out, and making the reader think. (I haven't read nearly enough of them, because I am a boring slacker. XD But someday!)

Now, I am not claiming to be Chesterton. Ha! Far from it. I will never evereverever be able to even aspire to his levels of intellectual buttkickery. However, I will say that I see quite a few similarities between blogging and his essays.

1. Blogs are public forums, rather like newspapers used to be (but aren't as much anymore), meant to encourage thoughtful discussion of the ideas presented (but, I mean, also fangirling. XD).
2. Blogs generally are posted to on a regular basis, even if not a daily basis, similar to many newspapers.
3. Blog posts (at least, mine, and those of a lot of people whose blogs I follow) often talk about books (whether to critique them or praise them), matters of philosophy or theology, things that are pertinent to modern life (whether an attack or a critique or a praise), and defense of things.
4. Blog posts often (but not always) set out to prove a point. 
5. Blog posts have a logical form, with a beginning, middle, and end, whether that's of an argument or a book list.
6. Blog posts, even if they're not setting out to prove a point, are meant to make people think and/or act, whether that's thinking about whether women can enjoy action movies or deciding if I should read a book on this list. 

In addition to all of that, back to the character limit of social media. Chesterton's essays aren't excessively long, but they're nothing to sneeze at, falling, from the ones I looked at, in the 4000-to-6000-character range, twice to three times as long as an Instagram caption, and around the length of many of my blog posts (though I tend to be on the high end of the range and towards 10000 characters). They don't feel all that long, and yet, they're just long enough to get his point across, and would lose something by being compressed. 

Bloggers, in addition to upholding the noble art of essay writing, are doing something which I find almost more valuable. They're not bowing to the dictates of a world which tells us that we need to compress, consume more social media in smaller chunks, work faster, smaller, go, go, go. They're not compressing their thoughts into 280, or even 2200, characters. They're taking time to think, let their thoughts and opinions and stories expand, and put that out for the world to see. And the readers are doing something almost more important--they're taking time to read and engage with such posts, in a world which tells them to just keep scrolling. They're taking time to think about the post, to comment, to maybe even have a discussion. Which is a great gift to a blogger who has put their sometimes scarily long thoughts out into the world and are worried that the world they have put them out into is on that no longer has the time to care. 

So, I hope that there are always bloggers, just like I hope that there will always be cherished readers of blogs. Because a longer attention span, a care for other people's thoughts, and the tradition of essay writing are all very much worth preserving. 

What do you think? Have you ever thought of blogging as being like essay writing? Did you enjoy writing essays for school, or no? Have you read any of Chesterton's essays? Do you have any New Years plans? :)