Blogging and Social Networking...What does it all mean?!

The irony of this article, written for the New York Times yesterday about blogging, lies in the article itself (and almost all articles). The title of the article is "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter", hmmm, let's blog about it.

For those of you who've managed to make it this far reading, the article basically says that with social networking sites at our fingertips, and all of our friends, family, lovers, ex-lovers, and even pets, already linked in, what's the point of a "long form" blog? If you only read the first few paragraphs of Kopytoff's article, that is what you'll walk away with, but what they're really saying is that blogging and social networking sites can work to aid one another. What's left of substantial "conversation" on the internet is still occurring on blogs (for the most part, obviously news sites aside) but the traffic to these blogs wouldn't be nearly what it is without the ability to self-promote blog posts and the like on sites like Twitter and Facebook.

I, personally, have chosen not to post my blog address on my Facebook and I do not post blog updates on my news feed, but I do Tweet blog updates and have the address listed in my Twitter profile. What's the difference? I'm "friends" with my extended family on Facebook, with people from High School who I haven't communicated with in six or seven years, other than to "accept" their friend request, and with an African stranger who spoke to me on 10th avenue one day, told me that he worked at D'Agostinos and asked for my email address because he needed friends in America. I don't want all of them reading my blog. My Twitter is reserved for close friends and internet admirers, stalkers, friends, and I communicate with other bloggers via Twitter. Most of my blog traffic comes from Twitter or my gchat statuses (not sure where posting a gchat status ranges on the social networking scale, but it certainly counts for something).

So what does this mean? Is this just another reaffirmation of the fact that the millennial generation is full of ADD-ridden, image obsessed, socio-phobic, electronically-obsessed, fast food-filled, coffee addicts? The latest marketing techniques for eReaders and iPads are magazine and newspaper-centric and stray away from the idea of reading books. So, does this mean that in our short-form culture long-form thinking and/or writing is becoming obsolete? Is anyone even still reading this or did you all stop after "ex-lovers"? I know that there are still people out there who believe in literature, people who aren't fifty or simply jumping on the bandwagon of the local farmers' market chit-chat while contemplating their pending order from Pottery Barn, but young people with charisma, and chutzpah, and goals. Most of those people have blogs, but who reads them? Is there enough of an audience to sustain a thought that lasts longer than 140 characters? What is happening?

Please, leave your comments. I am very, very eager to see what other people think of this.

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