Recovery Complete; Recovery Irrelevant

Well, I’ve finally recovered the complete contents of my blog. I’d intended to do so for quite a while, so why don’t I feel more excited about it?

I guess bevause it doesn’t amount to much: maybe the first ten posts on my original Blogger blog (somehow still online though I haven’t posted there since 2003!), which were ported over but somehow got lost along the way, have been reintroduced to the database, along with a ton of old creative writing stuff I long ago put up on the blog, then decided to take down and partially move over to my Stuff to Read subsite. (Which I’m thinking of doing away with, but that’s a subject for another day.)

In any case, skimming those old posts from late 2002 and early 2003, I am struck by how much blogs were like general stores in the Old West: you moved in, put up a shingle, and got traffic… even if your posts were nothing special, which is certainly true of my earliest posts. (I recovered them out of compleatism, more than out of any feeling of lost gems.)

Those days are gone: blogs have pretty much run their course as a social medium. It’s not that all blogs are dead, of course—there are plenty of blogs that thrive now, either out of the celebrity of their author, or their authoritative coverage on a given subject—but the personal weblog isn’t like it used to. In the early days, blogs took a little effort, if not writing skill—though I think the demand for better writing skill grew as the blog scene expanded—but Social Networks removed the need for effort and writing skill… and, well, a lot of the reflection got leached out of our social interactions online as a result, but crying over spilled milk ain’t gonna change things now.

In any case, I off-and-on wonder about the prospect of retooling this site, but I’m not sure whether that might not be more trouble than it’s worth. At the moment, most of the traffic to here is still related to Korea-specific stuff, even though I pos about that less often now, and even though I don’t feel as interested in posting about Korea generally. This blog’s earliest posts represent a kind of snapshot of me struggling to make sense of a new cultural and infrastructural landscape, but those baffling oddities have long ago transmuted to familiarities and pet peeves. I’m less interested than ever in posting rants now, and not just because they change nothing, but also because they’re the least interesting things I see when I occasionally flit through this blog’s archives.

Hm. It’s all kind of up in the air right now: not whether this blog continues (in some form or other) as much as how it continues. We’ll see, I guess.

 

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