If print is no longer king, where's that defunct webzine who published a couple of my poems a few years back??!!
We're so immersed in digital worlds that we often forget just how unstable and temporary the internet is. Even fully funded websites can disappear soon after they run out of money to pay for hosting, unless they're lucky enough to be archived by the likes of the British Library. Still, at least I've still got my copies of printed mags stretching back to the 1990s...!
THE HEN I killed a sick hen today. She could barely find the strength to
totter a step or two, then would fold up and sit, wings spreading, body
settling i...
You're right, the internet is ephemeral, has a short memory and doesn't care. Social media is the apotheosis of this new medium: it can lose things faster than a goldfish with dementia. When I logged in, just now, to post this comment, I was presented with a prime example of both how easy it is to forget things, and how much better blogs are at archiving information compared to social media: I was presented with my own neglected blog from 2006 where I attempted to write humorously about cycling. It was a time machine into the forebrain of my younger self, a nostalgic journey into now dead friendships via the comments, and a little sobering. I would have been denied this experience if I'd stuck it all on Facebook (or would it have been MySpace, at the time?). I maintain a different website, today, that is the spiritual descendant of this earlier work, although it too is flirting with irrelevance, because everyone who has read it comments on social media, instead of the website!
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting, Mike. Yes, these days, I find a post on this blog is often a very useful anchor/point of departure for discussion on social media rather than a space for debate itself to take place. Blogs have had to adapt to so many changes over the years, but the permanence of posts is so useful when checking back on stuff that was happening years ago.
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