To Blog or Not to Blog?

Hello and welcome back to Holding Heaven, dancing angels and all. It’s been a funny old week…month…year, hasn’t it? Not much to laugh about, sadly. Though  it’s helped me, (I woke up this morning and bookmarked Positive News to have a rethink about how I use this site.

 Call me a dinosaur but I still look back with a tear in my eye  on  those  golden days of blogging where you just hammered out the first thing that came into your head and aimed it  into the void. Oh for the Good Old Days of Typepad and Blogspot…None of this SEO, Influencer, Stats rubbish.  People actually talked  to each other . Ah…the camaraderie of those bygone times! We didn’t promote;  we wrote, safe behind the mask of pseudoanonymity. We commented. We had blogrolls. (Note the expression doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on the quality of said comments!)

 I first blogged  on Dave Walker’s brilliant Wibsite;  for me a kind of journal stroke meeting place where under the cover of anonymity, I had an outlet for all the joys, travail and angst of bringing up teenagers whilst studying theology (and being severely sleep-deprived  at the same time.) Certain   of us in this little community  first met on a certain ‘un restful’nautical  website (you know who you are) and at Greenbelt Festival – a favourite haunt for Post- Evangelicals, even if the word ‘deconstruction ‘ hadn’t yet entered our vocabs. 

But…then came the ‘Socials,’ (hate that expression). One  by one  we all succumbed to the temptation of the 280  character  sound-bite. So simple , so convenient. So  easy to fire off something you later regret. Or from what I’ve observed – something you’ve  hope  other people will regret.  Admittedly my experience has been relatively positive so far. To date   date the nearest to a ‘troll’ I’ve encountered was    a   disapproving response  from one obviously nearer to the Almighty than I after I closed the day as a  guest tweeter   with a child’s nursery rhyme instead of a suitably pious prayer . But hey – at least they responded. 

Meanwhile, the blogosphere became more competitive;   less friendly interaction and more pressure to have perfectly ‘curated’ polished, promotional  sites. Which legitimately have their place of course they do. Though the  accompanying pressure to present a perfect ,  polished promotional persona – definitely stressful. Whatever happened to ‘being yourself?’  And since I moved platforms four years ago , there is no blogroll! 

Don’t get me wrong; I  love Social Media. At its best it informs, entertains (channelling Lord Reith here) and can be a powerful force  for good. But Iately I’ve felt a pang of  nostalgia for the Good Old Days.( Not I may add, nostalgia  along the lines of those ghastly, click-baity sites with ‘rose-tinted’ comments disguising  a thinly-veiled misogyny , sexism and racism.) You know, the ones that have obviously taken  their inspiration from Monty Python’s ‘Four Yorkshiremen,’ only not nearly as funny.

So, will Holding Heaven continue to  polish its halo or hang loose in future? (I refuse  to say “going forward!”) Watch This Space.