It is no secret that I have been struggling with this blog for a couple of years. Most of the things I have wanted to write are inappropriate outside of work context, and everything else seems like uncritical regurgitation of already published news stories.
For a while there, I tried to only post how-to articles, or should I say, bug reports. Every time I ran into a problem, I would publish the solution if I found one. My post about fixing the OneDrive sync engine issues have received a lot of hits WordPress tells me.
It is a slightly depressing situation as I have always enjoyed blogging about whatever came to mind. However, perhaps there’s a reason for this blogging fatigue. As many other people have pointed out, the rise of Facebook, Twitter etc. have made it easier for people to create content in a more on-the-fly manner. The content is usually not very interesting as there’s little thought behind it. I would argue that a blog post reqiures more effort to produce, as it is longer and contains more information as opposed to a tweet which tends to be 140 characters worth of dopamine stimulating nothing.
In the immortal words of Denis Leary “have we turned into gerbils ladies and gentlemen?” I don’t know about you, but I certainly have. Everyday, I mindlessly scroll through status updates mixed with an unhealthy dose of advertisements in order to feel that I am up-to-date. Freeconomics have ruined my imagination. Thanks a lot Google.
Think for a moment about people like the late great Arron Swartz, who had serious visions for the Internet and compare that to how the it has now become nothing more than a vehicle for advertisement and privacy violations.
We as IT people should be focusing on making the world a better place. I sincerely believe that we have a lot of the tools required to do so, and here we are looking for new ways to enslave our users, making them dependent on their smartphones so we can come with new a creative ways of exposing the to advertising, making them want shit they don’t need to impress people they don’t like with thngs the cannot afford.
Anyway, enough complaining from an bitter guy. I will be attending Scrum kick off tomorrow with my new team. Hopefully that will spur some inspiration.