Maintaining a blog in the year 2020
In Jean-Luc Godard's film For Ever Mozart (1996), an aging film director, a Godard surrogate, is asked by another character: "Why is it dark during the night?" The fictional filmmaker answers: "Perhaps the universe was once young like you, and the sky was all ablaze. As the world grew older, it grew further away. When I look at the sky between the stars, I only see what has disappeared."
Recently, swept along on a brief wave of nostalgia, I found myself returning to old blogs I used to follow when Lights in the Dusk was new. At the time, the blogosphere was real: a network of writers, each with their own sites, commenting on each other's posts, sharing ideas, recommendations, and opinions. They'd discuss the notable film-related issues of the day. Trivial things by today’s standards, made smaller and more insignificant by the passage of time and the greater politicizing of ideas around systemic representation and identity politics that have occurred since, but nonetheless issues that generated huge discussions among the participants.
Unfortunately, I played no part in such camaraderie, too embarrassed by my meagre abilities as a writer and thinker to ever throw my opinions into the ring. I preferred instead to remain hidden, nameless, posting something only on rare occasions and then retreating back into the depression that overwhelmed me during those early years of the blog. I regret this now and wish I could have played a more active role in this still vanishing world.
Looking back, I feel like I touched the surface of something that was, in its own way, ephemeral and formative. An opportunity to play an active role in something that might have forged connections, shaped discussions, and sustained relationships and opportunities long after these blogs had ceased all activity. A brief window onto a particular moment in online culture that existed for only a short period and then was gone forever; like the stars remarked upon by the character in Godard's film.
For Ever Mozart [Jean-Luc Godard, 1996]:
From roughly 2006 to 2012, the blogosphere, for lack of a better word, was a thriving, living thing. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn't. Blogs that had been hugely popular and prolific ceased activity. Posts dried up and dropped off. Comment sections that once stretched to the double digits, with each new participant broadening and widening the initial discussion, became like ghost towns, boarded up and abandoned. Some blogs were even deleted by their respective authors who simply moved on to other pastures and pursuits. All those words, thoughts, observations and conversations just obliterated at the push of a button. The end of an era.
Every so often I wonder: What killed the blogosphere? Was it simply that the language of the internet evolved? That the way we access our online information changed? The idea of a blog – of sitting down at your computer to read an article or an essay – is such a relic to the early days of the internet as a desktop medium. With the advent of social media, microblogging and YouTube, the idea of sitting at a screen to read a 1000-word consideration of a film was positively archaic. And if you could reach an audience of thousands with a four-minute YouTube video, a group podcast or a one-sentence Tweet, why would you put the time and effort in to something as difficult as writing an in-depth consideration of a work when the finished article would receive only a fraction of that kind of audience?
It would be easy to say that for most bloggers, having an outlet was replaced by having a platform. It wasn't enough to carve out a small corner of the internet to share our personal thoughts, ideas and interests. There had to be an audience to go with it, and the more sizeable the better. This is absolutely fair and explains why so many bloggers decamped to a site like Letterboxd. For me, Letterboxd is an absolutely appalling site, full of trolls and attention seekers, but it has an enormous userbase and an active community, similar but much broader than the one the blogosphere could ever entice. This makes it an attractive alternative.
These days I write short notes about films I’ve seen on MUBI. I try to keep the blog active, but updates are obviously few and far between, and there are long periods where I don't produce anything for Lights in the Dusk. Often, it's a case of life and work getting in the way, or I'm working on other, non-film related projects that dominate my writing time, or I'm suffering with depression or writer's block, which makes it impossible to focus my thoughts.
I suppose what I'm saying is that it can be lonely being a blogger in the year 2020, and the site itself instills in me a great sense of sadness and regret whenever I think about what an eclectic community there used to be on here, and how active that community once was. Some day I'll compile a list of all the great blogs that are currently inactive, but for now I'll simply offer the following: if you've taken the time to read this post, or any of the other post on Lights in the Dusk, I thank you. Stay safe.
