Christian Long’s Stop Blogging Because You’re an Educator caught my eye the other day

STOP BLOGGING BECAUSE YOU’RE A TEACHER (or educator, administrator…)! …Because in a few minutes, days, weeks, months, years, it won’t matter. The pool will be saturated with edu-bloggers. Not just a few hundred. But a few million. Far more than any of us can filter or listen to or blog link or comment on or care about.

Christian’s post made me stop and think about what I’m doing here. It happens. Well, he didn’t, you know, make me do that. But he did touch on something I’d been thinking about. Isn’t that how it works?

I have a like/hate relationship with blogging. Mostly like. But I get wrapped up in a bunch of controversy, which doesn’t really suit my temperament. To my ear, arguments about nearly anything are a waste of energy. It would take me a long time to go around the internet straightening out the whole blog world, and by the time I got done I’d have to go back and start over because they’d all be off track again. So I leave that noble work to everyone else. Every now and then, though, a public minded citizen checks in and sets me straight. I should be more grateful. So they say.

To me, the blog is about discovery and reflection. Not so much about passion. It’s a lot like beachcombing. I read stuff that people write.

I follow links, and follow links from links, heading off in all directions at once. I find stuff and I think, Huh? Where did this come from? Cool. I save it in del.cio.us. It’s a weird obsession. Then I try to make sense of this muddle by writing about it. It’s a system.

Christian’s post triggered some comments about whether passion is a necessary or sufficient quality for blog authoring. Controversy. I don’t know. But the post also grabbed Eric Hoefler’s attention. Eric wondered about why he is blogging and whether redundancy was a problem that he needed to think about. A good question, I thought.

Update: So, I was working on another computer, not my normal one. I thought I saved this piece for publishing later, because I almost never just sit down and write something in one motion. But…I hit the publish button by accident and let it out before I was done. What follows is a rather rushed attempt to button this one up.

Timothy Burke wrote about the life of a blog in a reflective piece prompted by the retirement of Michael Berube’s blog. He wrote:

Mostly blogs ebb and flow with the life rhythms of their creator….However, I think there’s also something about the form itself that poses a problem, and that the problem has gotten more acute as blogging has evolved as a practice. A self-aware blog writer eventually starts to recognize static or repetitive patterns in their posting that threaten to devolve into schtick. Readers may not object: in fact, the larger and more stable a community of readers a blogger has, the more they may in fact come to rely on the blogger to merely convene or spark a rolling conversation among commenters, to be the rhetorical equivalent of comfort food.

For anyone hoping to sharpen and complicate their own writing, or to use a blog for exploration and discovery, however, this repetition and cumulative expectation can become a problem. I’ve talked here before about how much I find my sense of humor drains out of me when I’m writing here, because I’ve gotten trapped by compulsive reasonableness. When I write in this format, I find that my humor is sharpest when it’s snarky and a bit cruel (I don’t think this is true in person), so I often put it aside. There are times where that and other self-imposed limits and expectations frustrate me as a writer and even a thinker, however.

I’ve also hit a point where I’m frustrated by the rigidity of discussions across the blogosphere. …We’ve gone past the point where many conversations had the plasticity to go in unexpected directions. We’ve gotten instead to the point where many participants in the meta-discussion are defending fixed terrain, sometimes terrain that they’re paid to defend by institutions with a largely instrumental interest in blogs as extensions of some larger project.

This quote really moved me to think about the various motivations for blogging, and to wonder if there isn’t a natural lifespan for a blog that exhausts itself like any other project a person takes on. I read widely, and I’m reading beyond the teacher blogs more and more. I don’t know where this blog is going. I’m following an evolving set of interests.

Apologies to all who read my earlier, less considered post. I spend a lot of time in revision mode - and that wasn’t the whole of what I wanted to say. I was shocked to see that it was published when I logged in today. Ah well…