I Stopped Blogging. Time To Start Again.

I stopped blogging after discovering Twitter. Oh, not completely… but pretty close.

Twitter, for many years, gave me a similar kick to the one I got from blogging; it performed the same psychological functions, but with a little sprinkle of cocaine on top.

I got addicted to Twitter; but over time the world changed, and Twitter changed, and I changed, and it wasn’t fun any more.

So I am going back to blogging. (And going forward to podcasting, and maybe even video making.)

Basically, I want to explore sometimes quite complicated and nuanced ideas, without instant, constant, interruption. Twitter makes this impossible, because it is set up to encourage a perpetual cascade of premature judgements based on hasty misreadings of a couple of random lines taken out of context. Worse, it is algorithmically optimised to ensure that decontextualised fragments of your thoughts are globally distributed into the faces of the specific people who are most likely to misunderstand them, be upset, and lash out. Twitter has become a gigantic machine for punishing intelligent, thoughtful expression.

I’ll probably ease myself back into blogging by reposting here some of the pieces I’ve written for publications like the Irish Times and the Guardian over the past few years.

And I might experiment with posting some of my rough-draft, early-stage thoughts on interesting issues, as I develop them each morning in Roam. (Roam is a superb software tool for organising your thoughts; it is ideal for utterly chaotic thinkers like me, and I now use it every day as a kind of hybrid notebook/diary/mindmap/to-do list/morning pages/commonplace book . In fact, Roam really deserves its own blog post… Hmmm, yes. OK, if I do that, I’ll link to it here.)

Enough for now. This is just a note as much to myself as to anyone else: Less Twitter, Jules. More blogging. (And start that podcast you’ve been quietly faffing about with offline for so long.)