A stretch of river LVII: "Something old folks do while waiting to croak"
Because you people are at least as cool as I am, I've decided to give you a little glimpse behind the scenes of that arranging, deepening, enchanting thing we do here. (Image found here.)
So. It's a snowy Monday morning here, I'm tromping about in the park with Scruffy in about five inches of new snow, there's been so little wind that even the thinnest tree branches have as much as two inches of snow on them, I'm kicking myself yet again for not having a camera to take some pictures to share here with my reader(s), I'm thinking Hmm--I haven't had a Stretch of River post in a while . . . and then I recall this from Nick Carr (via Andrew Sullivan:I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.
This past Friday, the geezer whose tinkling of the QWERTY-keys you're now reading rode his bicycle out to his weekly tutoring job, a round-trip of almost 36 miles. I'm a healthy geezer, but a geezer (I'll turn 48 in April). But I'm healthy!
[snip]
In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging [according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project]. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers - those over 30 - who are doing more blogging than they used to.
And good old Blog Meridian is fast approaching blogospheric geezerdom as well--it will celebrate its 6th birthday on the 27th of this month. To paraphrase the Barbara Mandrell song, I was bloggin' when bloggin' was still cool.
I visited the survey to see if I could gain any insight as to why this dramatic, sudden demographic shift might be occurring. After all: aren't teenagers at least as self-absorbed as the baby-boomers and Gen-Xers who now comprise the majority of bloggers? Well, yes. But the rapid rise of Facebook among younger folks would seem to suggest that they are just as self-absorbed as they always have been--they just want to express that self-absorption more rapidly than blogs permit. No time to wallow. Now, a blog, on the other hand . . . but for the addition of the "L," it would read "bog": a really good place to wallow.
Carr's despair is rooted in his realization that "30 is the new 60," or something like that. I don't feel despair; it's really more like a puzzlement: Blogging brings me such regular enjoyment that it's hard for me to imagine more people, and younger people, don't find it equally enjoyable. Besides, I gave up deluding myself that I'm cool, or have or ever had a chance of becoming cool, a long time ago--back in high school, in fact. Now, it is true that I do ride a bike on a more-or-less regular basis, and here in Wichita that fact has the status of being so cool it's not yet cool. I'm actually cutting edge in something. Deal. But then again, all I have to do is dredge up this little missive and . . . It's not hard, then, to find "cooless" suspect: maybe certain bands or writers, let's say, are unknown to all but a few initiates for a reason--they SUCK! And if your tastes in music run toward such bands/writers that suck, well, then, why should I buy into your anti-hype of "Nobody's heard of 'em!!"? But then again, I'm not cool, 'cause I'm, like, old, even if I do have a blog, so what do I know?
