Earlier this week, I sprinted through the half a million barrier for pansy hits. When I say sprinted, it’s been more of a gentle stroll, and it’s taken nearly fourteen years to get there. Back in October 2010 when I published In the Beginning, my first ramble, the whole social media-verse was pre-big bang. Faceache and the Tweety Pie were only just taking off, and Instapout and Tik-Tac-Toe-Tok were still forming in the ether.
But things move on as they must – technology has become faster, smarter and more accessible. As a result, we now live in a world of information overload where separating the wheat from the chaff is too much of a faff. For the time-poor in a constant rush, it’s just easier to watch and listen rather than read and think. For many, vlogs and podcasts have become must ‘go-tos’ making instant cyber-celebrities of random nobodies. The fifteen minutes of fame we were all promised have been cropped to fifteen seconds to fit. And for the really attention-deficient, there’s a thin diet of cutesy pet pictures and short videos. And who doesn’t love a thirty second TikTok clip of a couple of hunky plumbers lip-syncing to Kylie while waving their heavy tools about?
So what that traditional blogging is old hat. Half a million hits in fourteen years may be small change to the new cyber-kids on the block, but I shall keep on scribbling my old nonsense, regardless – until I don’t, that is. ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ as they said in the War. Victory will be ours.