Why am I writing this? Link to heading
I haven’t had a blog for quite some time. This is probably for a couple of reasons.
First, for a long time I made most of my thoughts known on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. Now however, I’ve committed myself to leaving social media to the extent practicable. There are several reasons for this decision. I’ve read quite a bit about the damage that constantly being trapped in an algorithm does to our capacity to maintain focused attention. I’ve also become concerned about social media companies seeming abdication of their role to moderate interactions on their platforms. As social media has become increasingly “enshittified”, it has become more and more painful to participate in any good faith conversations on the Internet at all. Having a blog on a platform that I control is a way to circumvent that, even if the conversation unfortunately becomes mostly unidirectional.
Second, I’ve not been entirely confident that I have anything to say that is interesting enough to warrant it. It seems like the web has become too big, and the number of voices shouting over each other is already overwhelming. But I’ve been thinking recently that having something to say requires work. Not doing the work of writing down the things that I already care about or do that people might be interested in. I spend a fair amount of time doing work that involves learning a lot about statistics, reading books, playing video games, and participating in hobby projects that could be interesting to someone. I also periodically produce a lot of bad art, as I am trying to teach myself the basics of drawing in my free time. In truth, maybe I’m just hopping on the bandwagon of “learning in public.” I hope that writing my thoughts down helps me to clarify my own thought process, or even just to keep my ideas from slipping away.