Blogging for me did always involve a fair amount of navigating the whys and wherefores of what blogging is and is not. And one of the things it is, is a connection to other people who are doing the same thing, recording and writing in this shape and form. Truly one of the best parts of the early days of blogging was the following of links back and forth between blogs and finding new people and writing your first comment and feeling the spark when a new person commented on your own or you saw yourself in their blogroll.
For the longest time, the blogging world was more-or-less self-contained. Few of my irl friends had blogs and through blogging I met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends. Facebook did bring blogging and irl friends together in a new way, but it has never allowed for the discovery of new friendships in the way that blogging does.
What I like especially is the deliberate disconnect from facebook that blogging allows (especially because I’m not linking from facebook to here), the way it’s helping me to create a physical space between me and the zuckerberg juggernaut. There’s all the dreadful politics and manipulations of course, but more importantly, facebook has long since stopped being a place of connection for me. Rather than spark connections, it feels more and more like facebook dampens and dulls them. Compounding this, there’s just too much background chatter. Like a cafe with concrete floors and aluminium chairs where you have to talk louder and louder to be heard and the louder you talk, the louder everyone else must talk, so the louder you must talk and so on.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying I’ve added a blogroll today.