Well, so much for that experiment.
Over the past month I’ve found that, when I’m away from the computer and tuned out of the news cycle, I look upon this blog with disdain. It’s at those times that I want to stop blogging altogether, because I see the exercise as an unnecessary chore, meant more to give friends, coworkers and random visitors a daily dose of infotainment than to advance my own knowledge of any subject.
But I’ve also found that when I am reading the news and scanning blogs, posting to my own site becomes second nature. A single sitting can generate 3-5 posts, most of which I have to leave in “draft” mode for fear of inundating visitors with too much at once. I wonder how I could have ever considered stopping.
Something altogether different has been happening lately. Ihave been plugged in, scanning headlines and blogs, but when the time comes to post content on my own, I just haven’t had the appetite for it.
For example, why should I take 10-30 minutes out of my life to write about Martha Stewart? Did you know she’s going to jail? I bet you did. How about Terrell Owens coming to Philadelphia?? Yup, it’s true.
It’s the same with politics. George Bush is lying again, this time about John Kerry’s record. Kerry, who is both physically and mentally on vacation, is offering weak and ineffectual responses that only help the case against him. Oh yeah…and Howard Dean remains a disaster.
Maybe it’s just a dry spell, or some weariness with which I anticipate the next ten months, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all really the same old story.
We’ve become accostomed to seemingly jobless bloggers who sit at the computer all day long, surfing the net and tossing us popcorn punditry on just about anything they come across. It leads me to wonder: How are these people any different from their ill-informed associates, who themselves gather around the water cooler to prattle on about the top story on cnn.com, last night’s game, the weather, Survivor and Big Brother?
It’s not that I mind the blogosphere — I don’t. There are still those increasingly rare moments when blogging is an immensely stimulating experience. But there’s a fine line, I think, between offering one’s 0.02 on relevant subjects and playing slave to the scandal-saturated news cycle for web hits.
From here on out, I won’t carve out a portion of my time to blog about something — anything — once a day, every day of the week. When I have something worthwhile to add to the debate, I’ll post it. And when I don’t, you’ll get the next best thing: silence.