Tuesday, March 21, 2017

The blog is dead! Long live the blog!

In case you haven't noticed, I've mostly quit blogging. And I'm only blogging right now because I handed out my business card at a conference this weekend and noticed I still had my blog address on it. (For those checking it out because of the card, Welcome!)

I don't think I'm the only one lately to neglect her blog. Blogs are so last year (or two years ago). What are we doing/reading instead? Posting pictures of food on Instagram,  tweeting 140 characters, writing quips on our Facebook pages: more succinct and visual forms of communication. When I'm online, I am so used to scrolling through tweets and pictures and posts now that it's hard to linger on a page with more than one paragraph. (She said in paragraph two).

And we're (OK, I'm) binge watching TV in my spare time. There is so much good TV right now that it's hard to turn it off for even one night. Last week I finished watching "Victoria" on my PBS App. That's the wrong form of the verb--I didn't "finish watching," I "watched" all eight episodes of Victoria in one week. I watched it when I sat down in the recliner after a long day of work and chores. I watched it while I ate lunch alone on a break from at-home work. I like being swept up in historic dramas--the set design, the beautiful costumes and actors, the gorgeous scenery, all contributing to a feeling of resonant immersiveness. And now I'm watching "The Crown" on Netflix, worth watching for no other reason than to see what the $5 million spent per episode bought (e.g., setting up a state dinner party with what looked like 100 place settings of china and silver, and an orgy of flower centerpieces).

As the day get warmer and the yard/garden calls, I will be pulling myself away from electronic forms of communication and entertainment in the next few weeks--but I'm not sure where this will leave this blog. Is it an electronic form of communication, as well?