Silence is not golden

I’ve tried a lot of different things across the many permutations of my own Internet spaces. Often to keep things interesting, I have added features or attempted daily, weekly, or monthly series-type writings. Almost always, at the beginning of the year, I attempt to keep a writing habit. This year, I also wanted to start owning all of my texts across the various services in which I have become entrenched, especially Twitter.

Since then, I have posted thirteen “microblog” items that coordinated with posts on Twitter. Long story short: in attempting to make it easier on myself, I have made it much harder. By trying to automate much of what I was doing, I became more interested in the process of automating and less interested in the process of writing, the latter of which being the reason I pay money to keep this site up and running.

I have come to a decision point that has forced me to delete Twitter from my phone. I need to step back and assess its value, much like I did with Facebook awhile ago. I still hold these accounts and they come in handy periodically, but I started to become more of a watcher and less of a creator. Among many other things, I became petrified that I would post something there and forget to give it context here or vice versa.

While the blog is a dying art form to many around the web, we are on the cusp of what may be its renaissance: knowing that more and more of what a person puts onto the web is not owned by them.