Quote of the Week...from Michael McDonald

I don't use my blog anymore.  All the people I'm trying to reach are on Facebook.
                                                                    ---Michael McDonald

The Michael McDonald in the above 2011 quote...taken from a New York Times article by Verne G. Kopytoff...isn't the famous singer/songwriter of Doobie Brothers fame.  At the time of the quote this Michael McDonald was an aspiring young filmmaker who had been blogging to promote his videos.  When his viewership declined in direct correlation to Facebook's rise to prominence, he stopped his blog in favor of the new social media site.  I know his lament: I started this very blog back in 2007, before Facebook and when personal blogging was being heavily promoted on the Internet.  I used to get feedback from across the country and even abroad, although I did nothing to promote my blog...it has always been for me primarily a disciplined exercise in writing.  I did notice, like with Mr. McDonald, that no one was commenting on my articles anymore...other than spam sources... by around 2011-12.  So I decided in 2013 to begin placing links to my blog entries on Facebook...the difference now with the comments or "likes" I occasionally receive is that I know the folks making them while before it could be anybody with Internet access, from anywhere in the world...

This blog, which you are probably reading via Facebook, is actually a Google site and is still available worldwide as much so as it was eleven years ago.  The difference since Facebook's advent is that the potential reading audience has vastly shrunk due to people's drift away from "universal" interaction that characterized the blogosphere in the first decade of this century and toward exclusively associating with those they are familiar with...a tendency toward clannishness, something I find unhealthy.  Still, Facebook has been good to me over the past five years and I relish the connection with people I had lost contact with over the years, as well as with my friends and family around me now.  But I miss the more cosmopolitan nature of blogging whereby people across the planet were increasingly exploring others' blogs and establishing groundbreaking connections...Facebook pretty much smashed that once-promising trend...