My new agenda for blogging
Why did I decide to shutter my old blog? Although I touched on this in my final post there, I think it’s worth exploring a little more.
What I found was that I’d become trapped in the reactive, provocative mode of writing. It’s what I think of as the “news agenda” method: You write about what’s happening now, leveraging your experience and perspective to grab attention.
I was writing with perspective – it’s hard not to write with perspective – but not with any particular knowledge or insight born of actual on the ground experience.
And the funny thing was that it felt slightly corrosive. It is a bit like a circus, with a thousand clowns and jugglers all performing at the same time, trying to grab the audience’s attention, and no ringmaster to keep everyone in line. The temptation to shout louder, to be meaner, to be more provocative for the sake of it was the bit that was inevitably corrosive. Who really wants to perform in a circus like that?
It was, in fact, corrosive not just in a human sense - but also corrosive of my interest in technology. I’ve never been a classic technology person: my background is in the humanities, in philosophy. What I’m really interested in with regard to technology is the myriad ways that human beings use it to make their lives better, whether that’s a brilliant new engine which will take you from New York to San Francisco on a single tank of petrol, a new kind of seed that resists a previously-endemic pest, or a sublimely beautiful piece of software.
And that interest extends well beyond the most common type of writing about technology, which focuses on that great late-20th Century thing, the computer. There’s more to technology than that. A new industrial process, a new method of weaving that lets you make more beautiful clothes… all of those are technology too. Yet if you read “the technology sites”, you’d never know it.
You’d think that technology was Google, and Apple, and Microsoft… the web, and devices. And that would be it.
When you find yourself writing the umpteenth article about why product X is better than product Y, or why company Y’s patents are crazy, you find yourself questioning what you’re doing it for.
I’m lucky, in that writing about technology isn’t my day job: that, these days, involves creating content strategies for brands to help them communicate to their customers. So when I write about technology, or anything else, it should be for fun.
So, I decided to shutter the old blog and do something new. The way that I’m approaching writing now is that I’m only going to write about things that are more directly involved in my experience. No commentary on what anyone else is doing: Just commentary on what *I’m* doing, and one what I know from doing. Sometimes, that will involve writing about tech, because tech is still part of my life (like it is everyone’s). But it could equally involve design, fashion, the pros and cons of feeding cats dry food, or coffee.
With technology writing in particular, I now have one aim: Use my experience of technology to help other people who may have the same interests. So, for example, I might write something on my experience of using Android for the first time as an iPhone user, because some people might find some of the stuff in that useful. But what I won’t write is a “my platform is TEH FUUUTURE” piece, because… well, what’s the point? How does that help anyone? What does it do except play the page views game?
My only advice to anyone about writing is simple: Write about what you care about. Write about what matters in your life. Never, ever, fake it - if you’re not passionate about something, if something doesn’t really matter, don’t write about it.
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