Life This blog, and more specifically Saturday's Doctor Who review received a thousand hits. Blogger stats indicate that the sources were roughly a third each from twitter, the RSS feed and a link from the Tardis Newsroom. That's a spike. On an average day the reach is between five and six hundred, sometimes reaching seven. When the blog began roughly ten years ago, the main readership was about twenty or thirty and most of those were from a search engine, or at least that's what site meter would tell me. Needless to say, this increase astonishes me.
But it's also brought a certain element of mental paralysis. When you are writing for nobody, you really do feel like you can talk more openly about stuff and I did. The Rules were still in place (in short, no talking about work) but everything around that was fair game. But then I began to reach the stage where I'd find myself unable to contribute to a conversation because people had already read what I was about to say on here, I began to question everything, and with the increase in readers, that's become more and more acute. I showed someone my old Prozac Nation review today. I was astonished by how emotionally naked I'd been.
What does all of this self indulgence mean? Taking into account the irony of that question being posted on one of the modern world's great acts of narcissism, I wonder if I'm alone in this. There are a few blogs I've read since I began writing here, fellow journeymen and women and like me, who I've also seen turn from being very open in what they reveal about themselves to closing themselves off, becoming link blogs, or commenting on what they've read rather than writing about themselves. Clearly some have migrated to social networking and I'm also "guilty" of his, but others have perhaps been gripped by a similar kind of blogging dementia.
Which suggests that all of you have become some kind of excuse not to write but I truly can't believe that's it. Is it that the blog has run its course? I don't think it's that either. Is it that after watching the Adam Curtis thing, in which he talked about how posting on-line effectively means your parcelling up your feelings for human consumption that I've become concerned that I'm spending more time thinking about what I can write here and having experiences expressly so that I can write about them here, that I've forgotten what it is that I'd like to do otherwise? Or what I did beforehand?
Perhaps I'm just in weird mood this evening and have been for several evenings punctuated by adventures in time, space and Elizabethan theatre. Perhaps it's just anxiety that I'm reach an age when my tastes are narrowing having researched exactly what it is I do like and it's having a knock on effect in terms of what I'm writing here and I'm increasingly becoming bored by the sound of my own voice. Or in fear of just being boring. Yes, I'm sure it's just that. I need to stop being boring. If nothing else, these five paragraphs of random, incoherent musings could be offered up as an argument for that.