My niece was complaining yesterday that she’s working hard at her summer job (at the same place her dad works), and after a hard morning walked into the main office to find the place almost silent, with everyone hunched over their desks. She thought for a moment they were all actually being productive, but then someone called out a comment about someone’s photos on Flickr, and it turned out that everyone in the office was “busy” on Flickr.
It’s a fact that the internet’s second major function is as a playground for bored office workers – from the social networking sites to YouTube and Flickr, it mostly consists of the kind of thing you’d only be interested in if you were trapped at a desk for nine hours. I’m not being sniffy about this, because it’s exactly what I was doing when I worked in an office, and the pleasures of internet socialising are greater when real people you work with are involved.
I tend to be interested in the thing that I’m doing, and the thing I’m doing at the moment is teaching media studies – and that’s what I feel like blogging about, that’s the public me. Maybe it’s because there’s not much on telly at the moment, or perhaps I’m just tired, but apart from shopping for stuff, I’m not much interested in internetty things right now.
This is not a mid-blog crisis, but my posts here are becoming more infrequent, now I am blogging more professionally, as it were, over at the media studies blog. I’ve been personal-blogging since 2003 and have probably repeated myself 365 times on each topic. Let’s face it: this was never going to be anyone’s favourite blog. I’m on the cusp of killing it, but I’ll think it over during the summer.
Filed under: Flickr, MySpace, Time-Wasters, autobiography, media studies, narcissism, omens and portents , blogging, blogs, hiatus, intermission
I can’t really comment on your personal decisons about blogging. Its absolutely a personal thing.
In my case I started as an experiment related to social networking to find out how it all worked for partly professional reasons.
After a few months I got more of the hang of it and have it as a sort of backbeat on what I do, still with various experiments in mind. Like my current daft blog on a road trip thing- all true as is the rashbre central content to the best of my abilities.
I avoid my work as any sort of content topic (other than sometimes where I’ve visited) because I wanted the bloggy stuff as a counterpoint to my professional self.
I suppose my point relates to experimentation and some forms of resultant discovery. I set mine up with a mini (unwritten) charter about things I would and wouldn’t do and I sort of keep to it or deliberate sometimes if I’m edging over one of my previous demarcations.
It still has to be fun though, my mini mantra remains ‘there is fun going forward’.
But thats enough about me here. I hope we’ve not heard enough about Maximum Bob.
Regards, rashbre.
Thanks, Rashbre.
I’ve been logging in occasionally on my hols, using my bro-in-law’s old Mac, and I’ve decided to continue with this blog, but to merge it with my little photo blog, which was something of a dead letter anyway. I’m using the Monotone theme from the photo blog, which I like, and I’ve put my blogroll onto the About page. I might change the type of entries I do here to be more like photoblog entries, but we’ll see,