Content Creation: A New Hope

Chris De Jabet on Full City Press, about writing on the web:

Somewhere along the line it stopped being fun and maybe that’s why we all stopped doing it. Instead we settled for quips in 140 characters. And nowadays most people just hit the Share button on Facebook, churning over someone else’s content.  We stopped being creative and taking the time to really spell out what was on our minds.

Not long ago, I had friends asking me from time to time what I recommend to build a simple website, a website where they could easily share their photos and travel logs with their friends. Nineteen times out of twenty, my answer was Tumblr,¹ and each time I tried to suggest a cool domain name to go with it.

The last couple of years, nobody asked me.

Now everybody just uses Instagram for sharing photos with the world. Of course. It is obviously easier to share pictures and thoughts on an app friends and family already use. Meanwhile, what is left of Tumblr was sold for scraps.

Call it reach-potential, convenience, or just plain laziness, but using Instagram, or Twitter, or any social platform,² makes perfect sense for most people — it sure makes sense for me — yet it somehow does not give the same satisfaction as writing without the constraints of social media.³

If you nodded while reading this, then De Jabet has a challenge for you:

When was the last time you sat down and wrote an actual letter to a friend or loved one? When was the last time you received one? My challenge to you, dear reader, is to write something of substance and put it in front of someone else’s eyes. I promise it will be cathartic.

When it comes to how it makes you feel, tweeting just doesn’t compare to blogging.