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So how have I come back to blogging?

I'm a bit frustrated with the state of things is why. For a start, I dont get out much with two kids, so talking about things I've seen that have provoked thoughts isn't something that happens. And these things don't fit into twitter.

Twitter is to blame for a lot. If I have a quick thought, I can just blast it out, and compressing it is actually a bonus; it pays to be economical with language. It's a good skill to have. But if I have something that can't be forced into a tweet, it suffers or is just scrapped as I don't have time to flesh it out. This is what Chomsky called the 'concision trick' btw, which is quite dangerous; anything worth saying is eliminated and we are left with glib nothings; or a reasonable statement broken over 5 or 6 tweets, which is just appalling. 

But it's not just twitter. Something has changed, and now I barely ever get any phone calls, texts, landline calls, or emails. Almost all communication is going through social networks. They are swallowing not just communication, but the whole internet, which appears to be becoming just links to buzzfeed (and other, disastrously boring, websites).

And then buzzfeed starts publishing fantastic critiques of mainstream media and you don't know which way is up anymore.

Another criticism of facebook, other than the fact that they're evil and their business model is horrid, is that it's so noisy and monotonous. The endless stream of colourless posts is death.

You see, facebook to me is like a busy market, with an endless row of propped up stalls competing for your attention. What i want, to stay in touch with old friends, is not, to be honest, a drip feed of micro thoughts. I want a virtual home. I want to think, "oh, I've not heard from Beth for a whole, how is she doing?" And go to her homepage - that's what I'm looking for, no one has homepages any more - and see the sum of what she's been doing of late, and maybe pop a couple of discussion points down. Her, all in one place. Facebook's not the place to do that, even with your profile page. I'm officially done with it now. It just emailed me to say I hadn't logged in for a while, and I'm watching it squirm, waiting for it to beg me to come back. It can sod off.

I figured something had to change, so I tried to start a forum with Ed. Free chat with like minded people, I invited a bunch of inter-friends to join up, and just crap, without restrictions on message length, without posts disappearing of the bottom of the page to be missed, and without the feeling you're pissing in the wind to people don't care. But it was a failure, and no one took up the offer, which was very disheartening.

Which brings me back here, my old friend. If no one else is reading, at least I can use this to just catalogue my thoughts. If you are, post a comment on my webzone and we'll have a bloody chat.