I was sitting at my little house in the woods one evening last week when I noticed a steady stream of traffic wending its way down my road. Seeing two cars at a time on my stretch of country road is pretty unusual, but this caravan of cars and trucks continued all evening. I assumed that traffic was being re-routed from the state highway, and sure enough that was the case: a fatal car wreck had closed the highway and sent rush-hour traffic down a road so rural that our neighbor's dog can safely sleep on the pavement.
That's life in the slow lane: a sudden spike in traffic is a sign that something, somewhere is out of whack.
And that's life in the slow lane on this blog, too. Page visits are up and so are comments, but the vast majority of those page visits are from faceless bots and the vast majority of comments are quickly identified as spam and deleted. If I subtract the bot-driven spikes, readership is practically nothing, and comments have dried up.
Where did everyone go? I know many of my fellow academic bloggers have headed off to the Twitterverse, but I'm not going there for several good reasons, not the least being that I still have no cell reception at my house. I generally prefer the slow lane, but at the moment it feels a little too slow. And quiet. And lonely.
What's the answer? I wish I knew. I'm not one for courting controversy or making emotional appeals for attention, but at the same time I don't want to be the last one in the room who's unaware that the party is over.
So I'm sitting quietly and watching traffic and wondering what to do when the traffic finally stops. It's quiet over here. Anybody have a suggestion?
7 comments:
It does seem like blogs have mostly lost community. I don't have an answer. But I miss the community.
So do I. The comments in archives from the early aughts are glorious.
Don't give up! Many of us are reading via a news aggregator and we probably don't show up in the Blogspot stats. Do Feedly and similar sites send you your subscriber numbers, Bev?
I really enjoy your blog and look for new posts daily. It’s interesting, informative, entertaining, and above all, well written. Keep it going.
Thanks, all. I miss the community too! I've met some really amazing people through the online community. However, I notice that I'm also commenting less than I used to, and I can't put my finger on a good reason. Strange.
Me too. I usually read it through feedly. Also, I like to comment only when I have something worthy to add, and lately I've not been feeling too insightful. Please keep it up. Your posts always make me smile.
Still reading, just very short of time to actually write comments - everything is worse in the modern academy :-(
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