The Internet has the attention span of a caffeine-buzzed road-runner with diarrhea.
I say that with a lot of affection, because the Internet is
just what it is: Living in the moment (except for those nerds over at the
Wayback machine) and always certain, absolutely certain, like some moronic,
love-struck 14-year-old, that a Better Life TM is just around the corner.
Today, I read about Quora and how it’s offering a blogging
platform. Built-in audiences! Page vies of 30,000 plus for even timid,
poopy-head writers! Come join our flock and you will achieve Level Seven of the
current version of Internet Nirvana.
Hm.
Yes, places like Quora and WordPress and such are the big,
shiny dwellings designed by Frenk Lloyd Wright, built by R. Buckminster Fuller
and powered personally by some kind of massive lightning-bolt doohickey pedaled
by Nikola Tesla himself.
Blogger, by contrast, is the shabby little trailer house
tucked away on the bad side of the tracks, far from the Great White Way of
everything that is mod and groovy and hip and with it.
Please.
Yes, there may be distinct advantages to moving from this
platform to another. But most of them feel like a false economy to me. A
platform is a platform on the Internet. Some platforms may come accompanied
with the current shininess of absolutely now newness, but then again, so did
Friendster and MySpace. I’ve got a partial novel hidden somewhere on my
computer in which one of the characters sets up a protest site on MySpace.
Every time I read that chapter, I think, Oh, how quaint. She might as well be
communicating with her fellow protesters via telegraph. So tell me again, when
the new patina of nowest blogginess wears thin, will I once again be forced to
replace the VHS tapes of my blog with the DVDs of the future before, once
again, some jerk brings on the Big Bad Blu-Ray of Even More Now-y Nowness?
I have moved on, Internet-wise, of course. Back in my
college days, I did have a hand-crafted personal website that the university
tolerated on their servers (thanks, Wayback). I have not done much HTML since
then (and I really should get back to it, but between working full-time,
teaching part-time and writing part-time, I just don’t have the time any more)
but I have been around.
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