Permeable Membrane Blogging

Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WiFi hadn’t yet migrated to phones, blogging used to feel like the first step of an interactive process. You’d post something, and other folks would respond on their blogs, setting up a slow moving conversation as other folks joined in on their blogs. Interactivity was part of the appeal, and even in the absence of interactive responses, the potential of interactivity remained.

The membrane between you and the readership was thin, and highly permeable.

Over the years permeability feels like it’s fallen away. Conversations sped up as responses moved to tools like Facebook and Twitter, or became siloed to the comments section because folks weren’t maintaining their own feed of information. The nature of blogs transformed as folks figured out how to take this weird conversation platform and monetise it as a content publisher, setting off a boom of increasingly focused blogs devoted to tightly constrained topics, evergreen content generation, and content marketing for further services or products.

There’s less of a temptation to use blogs as a weblog under that model, because the membrane grows more resilient. Then the tools that enable the original permeability–RSS feeds, interlinked communities–fall by the wayside. Facebook eliminates the ability to stream your feed to a personal page, thus ensuring the only way to get a blog on the platform is professional Eventually, you’re no longer speaking to an audience who shows up on the regular, but folks who follow a link from a tweet, or a google search, or a Facebook rec.

The rewards for using a blog for things that aren’t highly concentrated content marketing seem to grow increasingly distant. Increasingly, you stop showing up in your party clothes and start deploying a more together, professional persona.

That notion of the permeable membrane as a default seems to have shifted to other platforms. Facebook had it, but lost it over the course of a decade as they figured out how to monetize the platform and turn everyone into a product. Twitter still has it, but also exposes the potential abuses of permeability, and seems perfectly content to let the fuckheads rule because (hat tip to Mike Monteiro) they make money by getting you to fight with nazis and despair about right wing fuckmonkey incompetents running countries into the ground right now.

At the same time, the platforms that still retain some level of permeability are the ones holding folks attention. People still cite Instagram as their preferred social media, because it still feels like a friendly place instead of a professional one. The resurgence of the email newsletter might be driven by folks engaging in email marketing, but it’s quickly been subverted by various creatives who simply enjoy talking to people about stuff on a regular basis.

The permeable membrane is valuable to us because it allows us to feel like we’re human beings. I’m kinda intrigued to see what happens as the Great Pause generated by the current pandemic sees us searching for more sources of connection online, and highlights the flaws of those places where the market has seeped in.

Personally, I find myself falling back on the blog. Resetting it as the default place where I show up and think, share, and otherwise engage with the folks who find their way here.

You may be fewer than you once were, but that just means we’re in the wee hours of the party when all the beer is drunk and you’re shooting the shit until sunrise.

For everyone else, I recommend checking out Wired’s article about why the RSS reader should be making a comeback. Right now, more than any other time, there’s something to be said for a curated stream of content as a break from the social media firehose.