The Decline of Blogging and Commenting

Nick Carr puts an exclamation point on the Pew Study, he writes Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly:

“…blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It’s only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to.”

There are structural problems with blogging namely the value of authorship, the cut and paste aggregators pretending to be blogs, the mob rule of the anonymous comments, most importantly the decline of value due to the faulty monetization models that favor quantity over quality. But certainly teens are not spending less time online, instead they preoccupy themselves with the Facebook statusphere and that is a horrible place to publish, relate or express individuality within a prison-like, predetermined grid (do listen to Jaron Lanier on this). People often say that we now read less, but we know that actually we read more syllables all the time, the question is what are we reading instead or in addition to.