Media – the blog as a constant?

"Media change, the blog as a constant, what an exciting topic!" I thought and planned this post, researched the beginnings of blogs and was ready to work out what the constant is. Again and again I came to the conclusion that there is only one single constant!

It starts with wanting to define what a blog actually is. Difficult. You could probably ask twenty bloggers and get twenty different answers. Let's skip the click to Wikipedia, a theoretical definition won't help us here.

What we can probably agree on is this: A blog is a chronologically arranged collection of posts on a website. At least that's a constant that runs through all blogs. But not what I'm looking for.

The difficulty alone of naming what a blog is already shows what it is not: constant. The only constant, one might think, is steady change. That's what version 1 of this post concluded.

A pretty weak argument. If someone else had presented that as an insight to me, I would close the tab at the latest now.

Perhaps we'll find the constant if we place "the blog" alongside other media forms of the past, let's say, twenty years. About twenty years ago, blogs found their way into the mainstream, if you will.

I was almost willing to write that media consumption has changed several times drastically in those twenty years, but the blog was always there. "Stable," I thought, "but completely off the mark."

We all used to read long texts on the web, but then other formats came along, especially video. First longer videos and with Vine, Instagram and finally TikTok, video lengths became shorter and shorter. Today nobody watches videos longer than a few seconds.

That's all nonsense, of course. We all still read diligently and anyone who wants to accuse "young people" of just sitting in front of TikTok watching short videos has never been on Twitch, where people watch streamers for hours.

The demise of different media formats is regularly conjured up. The demise doesn't happen, but it shows that those who positioned themselves flexibly early on are better off today than others.

Good. No (digital) media form of the last twenty years has significantly lost relevance or disappeared entirely. The traffic figures shift between media again and again, but they're all still there.

So saying that in contrast to other media forms, blogs are still there, also limps. We would be back at the beginning of our search.

Speaking of beginnings.

The first weblog named as such went online in 1997 – Dave Winer's Scripting News¹. But even before that there were already similar websites that called themselves Cybertagebuch (cyber diary), for example.

Posts in blogs could also simply be one-liners in the past. Many posts in my blog looked like this twenty years ago:

And I wasn't alone. Short thoughts, an image, long texts, all of that existed. Unlike in newspapers, on television, on news sites, which at best categorize their pieces into formats like "glossary," "reportage," "commentary" etc., the format "blog post" never existed.

In we 2006/2007 saw the first major wave of migration. Many of the bloggers who had previously written short blog posts discovered Twitter for themselves, and later Facebook too. Short posts migrated to these networks, which were also much more open back then, offered interfaces and provided RSS feeds. So why not?

As a result, many blogs died.

Dying is a good keyword. RSS was introduced in 1999 and has basically been dead ever since. I have more RSS feeds subscribed than ever and heard that there's supposed to be something like podcasts.

But RSS is a good example of something that happened and happens with and in blogs. They drive the development of certain technologies. RSS, pingbacks, trackbacks, webmentions, comments. But also network effects, driven by blogrolls, webrings, communities.

In my original article, I tried to work out at this point why blogs are so important today, why they represent important, open, democratic pillars. I wanted to raise the flag and convince you all to blog by all means.

If you're reading this, I probably don't need to convince you anyway. I know which bubble I'm moving in, and what I wanted to write there was almost fishing for compliments. Let's skip that.

Besides, it distracts us from the actual question. The blog as a constant?

Considering the lifespan, we're talking about a good 25 years, sure, there the blog is a constant. The news site too. The forum too. Mailing lists...

If we compare the blog as a kind of format and compare it with the known formats. No, then the blog is rather the opposite of a constant. There was never the uniform format, as we have already established. The journalistic formats, on the other hand, have existed much longer.

Of course, I could now start with the fact that I've been blogging for so long and my blog is therefore a constant in my life, but that's not true either. There were years when I rather operated my podcast, there were years when I published almost nothing, there were years when I let myself be carried away and tried to be a successful blogger, and was able to make quite a few bullshit bingo crosses.

The topic brings media change to the forefront.

If we take the last twenty years, because those are the years I consciously experienced, then I see little media change. I see platforms replacing each other and I see the phenomenon of ever-larger perception silos. In my opinion, however, this is not media change, but a form of radicalization that is increasingly coming to light today. There is now enough literature on the topic; you almost get the feeling that this has been worked through step by step.

"The media" now have the task of facing this. We bloggers probably too.

The blog as a constant; I don't think that exists. As much as I initially wanted to promote exactly that. Is that bad now? No. Blogs have always developed in all possible directions. We all have our own concept of them. And probably that's exactly the reason why we still talk about blogs today. They constantly change, there is no the blog.

Of course there are blogs that consistently stick to what they've been doing for years. I look forward to reading their posts just as much as posts from blogs that keep trying new things.

You know what's beautiful? I can already see lots of blog posts from the other participants in the blog weeks in front of me, who will write exactly the opposite. And I'll probably be able to agree with much of it.

I still can't define what exactly a blog is, let alone what the constant could be. I find it almost a bit unsatisfying to end like this. I would like to have something I can present. But I believe that just as little as the format "blog" is needed, a constant is also not needed.

I don't even know what my blog will look like in six months. Maybe it's also due to the concept of blogs that I have in my head. I always wanted and still want to try so much and break out of the conventional.

For me, only one thing is constant: The opportunity to change something is always there.