e often are urged to avoid drawing easy conclusions about what happens around us, because snap judgments can be ill-informed and just plain wrong. But sometimes, they’re right on the money. This may be one of those times.
My conclusion? What follows is further proof of the dumbing down of America.
Citing work done by the Pew Research Center, The New York Times reported recently that blogs “are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.” The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that “from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs,” the Times reported. “Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”
The story quoted some former bloggers as saying they are too busy to write lengthy blog posts. Others said they were frustrated by the difficulty of attracting readers. Some former bloggers said “social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family,” according to the article.
What’s going on here is simple. Blogs arrived on the scene before Facebook and Twitter. So, initially, people with short attention spans who could not string more than 140 characters together if their lives depended on it took to blogging as the best way to express their deepest feelings, which never required more than a sentence.
Once social networking sites blossomed, the “all of my thoughts fit on a bumper sticker” class of blogger had a much more appropriate medium for saying very little very quickly in very few words.
Bye bye blogging; hello Twitter. Except, that is, for those of us who actually enjoy writing.
“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Elisa Camahort Page, founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network, told the Times. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”
So here’s the other keystroke, as it were. While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, the number of users is up six percentage points among 34-to-45-year-olds who are online, five points among 46-to-55-year-olds and two points among 65-to-73 year olds.
I don’t know where the 56-to-64-year-olds fit in because we weren’t mentioned in the Times story, but I’m guessing we’re holding our own in the blogosphere. Try as I might, I just can’t bring myself to abandon blogging so I can spend more time updating my Facebook “status” with a pithy comment about what I'm eating for lunch, what I think of the weather or which TV show I'm watching.
My conclusion? What follows is further proof of the dumbing down of America.
Citing work done by the Pew Research Center, The New York Times reported recently that blogs “are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.” The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that “from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs,” the Times reported. “Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”
The story quoted some former bloggers as saying they are too busy to write lengthy blog posts. Others said they were frustrated by the difficulty of attracting readers. Some former bloggers said “social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family,” according to the article.
What’s going on here is simple. Blogs arrived on the scene before Facebook and Twitter. So, initially, people with short attention spans who could not string more than 140 characters together if their lives depended on it took to blogging as the best way to express their deepest feelings, which never required more than a sentence.
Once social networking sites blossomed, the “all of my thoughts fit on a bumper sticker” class of blogger had a much more appropriate medium for saying very little very quickly in very few words.
Bye bye blogging; hello Twitter. Except, that is, for those of us who actually enjoy writing.
“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Elisa Camahort Page, founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network, told the Times. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”
So here’s the other keystroke, as it were. While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, the number of users is up six percentage points among 34-to-45-year-olds who are online, five points among 46-to-55-year-olds and two points among 65-to-73 year olds.
I don’t know where the 56-to-64-year-olds fit in because we weren’t mentioned in the Times story, but I’m guessing we’re holding our own in the blogosphere. Try as I might, I just can’t bring myself to abandon blogging so I can spend more time updating my Facebook “status” with a pithy comment about what I'm eating for lunch, what I think of the weather or which TV show I'm watching.
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