Blogging is so 2005

Scott Kieran, Memory Holes (Random Access) II

Blogging is so 2005. My students, most of them in their early-twenties, had no idea what a blog was when the word was mentioned in class. When told to research a film blog for homework, they found the format confusing and the text hard to follow. How do I know how many friends this blog has? and Where are all the tweets? quickly led to Do you really want me to read all this? Students felt unable to follow the date, post, comment logic of each post and became lethargic when faced with so many words to sift through. Is this really how people used to communicate? they asked, shaking their heads in shock. One clever student, using the scroll bar on her mouse, realized there were even more paragraphs beyond the initial ones first seen on screen. Amidst the jaw droppings and guttural mumblings, I realized a simple class in film production had turned into a valuable history lesson about arcane forms of personal expression.