I have been blogging here for quite a while, though very intermittently. Seeing a major technological site and multiple bloggers writing about bringing back personal blogging1 made me wonder why many people had chosen microblogging for a while and shifted their writing to threads of micro-posts. It is often believed that writers usually follow the places where their readers were. I must confess that despite maintaining this blog for several years, I have been more active on some microblogging sites than on my blog.
Growing up at the beginning of the web 2.0 world, I am very nostalgic about blogging. I feel that those were great times. Writers and bloggers maintained their blogs and shared their thoughts about anything from food to technology, music to photography. Somehow, the centralized platforms brought bloggers and readers together on the same platform, taking away with them the free nature of the web and creating walled gardens, forcing many readers to create accounts on these platforms, sometimes disgruntled.
Bring back Blogging sounds nostalgic to many of us who loved writing on the web and sharing our viewpoints online, some ten to fifteen years ago. Those memories still linger in our minds. It is not that most of us had completely stopped blogging. However, some of us had started shifting our attention to microblogging, and eventually forgotten our blogs. 2023 calls us back to our blogs.
There are several posts I still need to write or rather complete. I follow evolving story format. I ensure that I jot down my thoughts whenever they come to my mind for later elaborate writing. Sometimes, I do wonder whether I suffer from writer’s block2. I guess that I developed this format to help me elaborate my thoughts whenever possible, not constraining myself from writer’s block (anymore).
However, 2022 ended with some major surprises. With the arrival of large language models, notably ChatGPT, I guess that some of us are going through some sort of existential crisis and wondering what it means to write in this age when blog posts could be written by the so-called “artificial intelligence” tools. Not a day goes by without coming across a blog post or a micro-post about the impacts and benefits of such tools on our society. Yet, I have not made up my mind. I am wondering what it means to be a human, to be creative, and to share our viewpoints in this forthcoming era. I am wondering about the day when these tools are also connected to the web and have access to real-time information. Will they write blog posts? What will be the role of humans? Will we read these posts or ignore them? More questions haunt me. I am still looking for answers. But, in the meantime, I finished writing my first post without using these aforementioned tools and sharing it online.
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