Why Blog?

The blog is a dying medium. It peaked several years back and is now in something like decline. Except for a few exceptional cases, it's difficult to reach readers with a blog. At least, this is what I intuit from the present media ecosystem. I recall a moment, sometime around 2010, when I realized I could spend my entire day, every day, reading the blogs of people I knew personally. (It calls to mind similar moments in the past, noted by scholars like Roger Chartier and Andrew Piper, when a surfeit of books made reading everything feel as impossible as it actually was.)

So, why blog? I have a few reasons.

1. I can't do Twitter. For various reasons, including the way the platform seems designed to make one's life seem insufficient (it's the HGTV of the internet), I stepped away from Twitter a few years ago. I have only regretted it when I missed out on interesting conversations on so-called Academic Twitter.
2. I am not on Facebook, and I never have been.
3. I want to share stuff! In my research and teaching, I regularly encounter things that I think other people will like, or at least find interesting. In the past, Twitter provided an outlet for this stuff, but see #1.

So, a blog it is. I'll try to keep it short.