Decline of the Blog?

Earlier in April, I posted about abandoned blogs, and I chastised myself for not posting enough.

This really got me thinking about why people abandon blogs, and about the future of communications media. My daughter Laura once outlined the history of communications (she’s a book person) to me in terms of who’s writing and who’s reading:

One to Few
--Before the printing press, communication was essentially one-to-one. Though books would circulate, there was a small literate audience, and books were not mass-produced.

One to Many
--The advent of the printing press made books a form of one-to-many communication: an author could reach an audience of thousands in one print run. This was considered the normal form of communication with other technologies, including tv, newspapers, radio, and film. One person (or a select group) would create a message, which would then be transmitted to a wide audience.

Many to Many
--New technologies encourage many-to-many communication. Blogging is a forum where anyone can author. Wikis encourage vast participation. This could be considered a democratization of knowledge production, because many people can now produce, but there is also a backlash because some people are worried about the validity of the sources that they read.

Blogs
--Some blogs are of interest to a large segment of the population. Other blogs, like this one, have a more specialized audience. But even smaller blogs are out there where people write only for their friends (these are not linked to, and many blog writers do not expect anyone else to read their blogs except for friends). Though the Globe and Mail says that blogs are being abandoned at a staggering rate, Perseus claims that the majority of blogs are written by teenage girls and update twice a month to keep in touch with friends and family. This is not to say that many blogs are not being abandoned regularly, this is often the case, but I just wanted to put things in perspective. You must take it with a grain of salt that over a million blogs have been created, and after the initial post, there is no more updating. This is hardly considered an abandoned blog, because it’s not even quite a blog in the first place. These blogs—one-entry wonders and teenage lifetools—are quite different than the blogs I read each day and the blog sphere that I interact with. It seems to me that if these are being abandoned, we have to assume that it is simply growing pains, and not a sign that blogs will no longer be viable communication tools in the future.

And I am not abandoning my blog but am traveling for a week so might not post.