I remember when I first made a blog. It was in 2012, year 8, when everyone had one, our blog titles and urls named to reflect subtly our personality as much of possible.
You could see how the nature of modern social media affected our style of blogging-most people's posts were short, not really a 'post' in the sense it was simply a three sentence update of what happened in the last period of school that day. An inside joke, one funny period in class, a moment's worth of angst was what I typically came across on my dashboard, which was probably more geared towards a twitter account as opposed to a blog.
I'd say my decline in activity was primarily because I had nothing left to say. I'd shared everything I wanted to, and had nothing left to say. My position of anonymity limited what I could post about, lest my family somehow stumble across it and read into my ideas and thoughts, and then identify me from photos, or personal life events I blogged about. Anything recounted about my personal life was done with as distanced a voice as possible. This gave me a relatively 'niche' blog and once the things I wanted to say were said, there wasn't much else to talk about.
Whilst there would be longer posts, they were typically a few paragraphs long describing an event of sorts, or a rant. For this reason, my blog got something of a distinction amongst some my friends for having lengthy posts discussing ideas about self-identity, societal problems, the human being as a personality, so on so forth.
Scrolling down my dashboard-old blogs-long abandoned, turned to private, closed, scattered like litter on a sidewalk and I do think it's something of a reflection of my generation, arguably the first to have go through teenage years with the 'instant' nature of modern social media. Double tap, like, retweet, swipe left.
Elaborating upon the more 'twitter-esque' blogging styles of my schoolmates, I suppose that was what lead to the decline of collective activity amongst my cohort. Blogger is, by design, catered for long posts with detail- as reflected in the amount of different features one can have in a text body- standard bold, italics, hyperlinks and dot points. Your dashboard'll only let you read the first few lines of the post, before you have to click on it, and most people in my generation aren't too used to that on social media. The dashboard/walls/feeds on twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the such allow you to see everything all at once, and can do so because all the content on there is relatively short compared to that blogger is designed for longer posts. I think that utimately did not co operate too well with the 'one glance' nature of social media that the majority of my nation is used to.
I also do think the context of most of us at the time would have played a role- we were thirteen and angsty. We had 'issues' (which seemed like the biggest deal at the time) and we wanted to voice them. We wanted friends to know but not the 'entire world' that was facebook. So I suppose blogger provided a decent platform to do so. As we grew and openly laughed (but inwardly cringed) at what we said when we were thirteen or whatnot, we wanted some distance to the past. We had moved on.
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