Hello, and why I am here

I used to blog a lot. 

In the heyday of the Australian blogosphere, I was prolific, both in how much I wrote and in how active I was in the community. When I was a parent of very young children, back in the mid-noughts and early 10s, blogging brought me joy and connection and delight. 

Times changed, as times have a way of doing, and the rise of the socials meant a decline in the blogosphere and in engagement with blogs. That was alright; change is inevitable, and it's not always a bad thing. I enjoyed the early days of Twitter, along with many of my peers. I had a stop-start relationship with Facebook for years, but from about 2016, I have been a regular user, due mostly to a number of Groups I am in there which have been very important to me. I have Insta (albeit private) for photos. I was part of the post-Musk X-odus and have been paddling aroound on Threads since 2023. TikTok has, thus far, passed me by, which speaks to my generational profile as much as anything else.

And, gradually, I too stopped blogging. Having started my first blog in 2003 and blogging with varying frequency from then until 2020, I have been silent in the blogosphere since that time. My older blogs are still active (although I have rendered a couple of them private), but I have no longer maintained them, and they are dusty empty houses tucked away in a back alley of the ferocious city that is the contemporary Internet. 

But the events of the past couple of years, and especially the past 6 months, have caused me to really question both what I gain from being active on social media, and what it increasingly costs me, and not just me, but society as a whole. I don't think any technology - yes, including generative AI! there's a post coming on that - is intrinsically evil, but I do think that social media is now largely harnessed to oligarchical ends, and is both reflecting and fuelling some of the more depressing trends of late-stage capitalism as we see them playing out across the globe. 

I have been feeling a growing sense of discomfort with it all - from the constant advertisements to the brutality of a lot of the content to the data mining to the shaping, and arguably distorting, of public sentiment. So, this is my experiment - to see if returning to blogging can scratch some of the itch for writing and sharing, in a less-saturated and compromised space. 

I am very aware that everything I write here can easily be traced back to me via my enabling account, and I have accepted that the data I am providing about what I like and don't like will be weaponised by algorithms to bombard me with ads every time I dip my toe online for any reason. I am not under the illusion that this is a perfect solution, by any means at all. 

But if anyone also wants to talk about books or read poetry or shoot the shit about social issues without ads in your face (because I *can* control what ads you'll see here, which is to say: none), well, I'd welcome your company. Comments will be moderated by me, so you also won't see spambots or terrible stuff there. (Yes, I am censoring. No, this is not illegal, as I am not a government who proposes to put you in jail for your free speech, I am a private individual who is allowed to decide what speech is tolerated in my house, including my online house). 

I'm going to start by publishing a few book reviews of books I have recently read, and will add poetry, older book reviews brought across, and some opinion pieces in due course. If no one sees any of it, well, that's alright. I mostly do it for me, anyway. Here we go!