I’ve been blogging in one form or another for about eight years now, and in earnest for about six. Still a newbie in comparison to some, an old hand to others.
I’ve undoubtedly gained work through my writing, both directly and indirectly. But that’s not why I do it – it’s a side outcome, not my goal.
I blog because it helps me to make sense of my world: it’s my diary, my sketchbook, my notepad. If I can’t make sense of something that’s in my head in around 500 words, I will either persevere until I can or dismiss it until it comes back again better formed. It’s a way to make connections with other people. It’s a way to gather feedback, test, plan, experiment.
I’m not doing this for reasons of “content marketing”.
Over the weekend I received a comment on a blog post that I wrote back in 2010. One of the most emotionally-loaded things I’ve ever written. Something that I thought long and hard about publishing because, well, wasn’t all this blogging thing a bit of a trivial platform for such important feelings and emotions? Would it hurt others as a result?
(As a sidenote, I’ve just remembered that my very first blogging happened eleven years ago, anonymously, as I tried to make sense of my first marriage imploding. So much for holding back emotions.)
Read the comment and the original post here. That’s an instruction, not a rhetorical hyperlink.
So much of what I see around me at the moment with where technology is headed seems to be ruled by people seemingly without emotion; the Bezos and Ubers of this world who would rather that all of this soft stuff about people and their feelings could be stripped out and replaced by artificial algorithms that are pure and perfect.
Those of us who actually have a soul need to be stronger in defending the human part of technology. We’re not the bugs, the flaws. We are the reason why any of this stuff happens, and it’s our ideas, our emotions and our feelings that power it all. And my, what a powerful medium it can be.
mmitII 