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I Miss a Full Feed Reader

“The architecture of social media exploits our sense of right and wrong, reaping profit from the pleasure we feel in expressing righteous outrage.”

–“How Social Media Exploits Our Moral Emotions

That was going to be the whole post, full stop.  But I suppose I should unpack the fact that if someone is deriving pleasure in expressing their righteous outrage, someone else is feeling drained from that very same exchange.  It’s not that I want people to stop.  I think the outrage, many times, is justified and necessary.  But it affects us.  Sometimes the emotional cost is the equivalent to a nickel and other times it’s equivalent to a dollar, but there are always emotional costs.  Twitter may be free to access, but it still costs you something.

But.

I don’t feel that way about blogs.  I go on blogs and read opinions, and I don’t walk away drained.  I walk away sometimes Googling for more information or disagreeing or nodding my head.  Posts stay with me for hours, but they don’t gnaw at me.

I wonder if I’d feel the same way if Facebook just let everything flow past me.  If I didn’t feel like my feed was being manipulated to see more (and more and more) of one thing.  If it didn’t feel so curated.  Blogs, at least the ones I read, still feel raw, like they did at the beginning.  We may have gotten a little fancier with our layouts, but the general content still veers towards understanding how someone is processing the world as opposed to absorbing the world.

I miss my feed reader being as full as my Facebook feed.

9 comments

1 Noemi { 06.17.18 at 11:58 am }

Just the other day I was looking at each section of my reader on my browser (where I see each post as a single line to be opened, so I can see dozens in one screen) and I realized that only 2-4 blogs pop up regularly in any of the categories, even though I have over 50 subscriptions in each category. I also miss when my reader was full. I’m not even on social media so blogs are all I got. And I feel like the less others write the less I write. I wish I didn’t do that. I need to write more myself.

2 Noemi { 06.17.18 at 11:59 am }

I also meant to say… thank you for being one of the blogs that ALWAYS pops up in my reader. Thank you for still writing.

3 Phoenix { 06.17.18 at 2:32 pm }

I’ve also been missing having a lot of new blog posts to read. I’ve only been reading for about 3 or 4 years and I’ve only been blogging for a year and a half, but I’ve noticed that there aren’t as many new posts as often as there used to be. I’m thankful for everyone that writes. I’m hoping that it’s just cyclical and my favorite bloggers will start writing more often again. Thank you for writing regularly! (And thank you for mentioning me in the blog round-up a week or two ago!)

4 Beth { 06.17.18 at 7:19 pm }

Yes to this. I found FB very draining emotionally and deleted my account but I don’t feel that way about blogs. Blogs are written for different purposes, at least the ones I read. I was worn down by the falsness and “look at meeee” aspects of FB which just aren’t the same in the blog world. I’m very thankful to still have blogs to read.

5 Mali { 06.17.18 at 8:19 pm }

Oh wow, if there’s one area where blogs are growing, it is in the No Kidding sphere. I struggle to read all the blogs I want to read, making the No Kidding blogs the bare minimum (and yours), and then expanding out (eg to a few others) when I can.

I’m also active amongst the very small group who is blogging daily this year, and that takes a lot of time and focus.

I’m wondering if your feeling of loss is also because you’re not really an infertility blogger anymore? Infertility blogging is intense, within a specific period of time, with specific goals. It seems to me that when someone resolves, there is often less intensity (except I think, initially at least, in the No Kidding/childless sphere) to the blogs and the relationships, especially as the years go by.

6 Cristy { 06.18.18 at 1:11 am }

I’m saving this post to chew on a bit more, but I completely agree with you about it being a more holistic experience with blogs than FB feeds. Even though we tend to surround ourselves with like-minded people, FB takes it to the extreme.

7 Jenny { 06.18.18 at 3:52 pm }

I agree with Mali. Since resolving, and since seeing most of the bloggers I followed resolve, my reader has become rather bare. I think once that happens, you do lose the drive, the need, and maybe even just the energy to blog. I know for myself that I’ve become too drained in all aspects to want to spend a lot of time ruminating on my thoughts, and then going to the monumental effort of trying to put them into some sort of coherent format. I guess I also feel that I don’t have anything unique to contribute. There are so many mom blogs out there, who wants to hear anything about my mundane parenting experiences?

8 Lori Lavender Luz { 06.18.18 at 6:22 pm }

Lots to unpack in your post and in these comments. I once wrote about internet outrage and how it costs us. Feels like a negative. Yet reading blogs usually feels like a positive. Maybe it’s the inherent connection as we get involved in people’s stories, in interacting with them in their space and in ours.

9 Persnickety { 06.20.18 at 5:59 am }

Me too! I think it is because with a blog you get more of the story, with fb it is a moment.
I retain FB because I have to, and because there are a couple of elements I appreciate, but I resent it.
I am guilty of not updating my blog much, and part of it is social media- I post weekly on fb as part of a secret group, I scroll through Instagram.
I think there is something to the idea that once you resolve the fertility process it becomes less urgent- and I suspect that the strength of the no kidding blogosphere is because there is a recognition of that lack of urgency and a desire not to let it happen.
My other big blog reading area was craft blogs, and it came as a surprise to see how that has lost out to Pinterest. Once I could google an idea or technique and find a myriad of blogs, now every link is to Pinterest. And then when I click I don’t get to go to that link🙁

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