Unless something really remarkable happens in the next half-dozen days, August will end up being the third straight month in which I haven’t done a blog post for Forbes. I’m not doing a whole lot of blog writing here, either, which has me thinking a bit about why that is. Inevitably, given how long I’ve been doing this, that turns a bit toward thinking about the late, lamented golden age of “the blogosphere.”

The main reason for the lack of blogging at Forbes is just general busy-ness. I have a book under contract, a day job that requires a bunch of my time, and some other projects that occasionally need my input. And, of course, there’s the global pandemic that’s screwed up absolutely everything, which makes fetching and feeding the sillyheads take up a bigger chunk of my work day that it used to. It’s just hard to find time to blog.

A secondary reason is that writing blog posts had started to feel more like an obligation than something I enjoyed doing. This largely reflects a change in the nature of blogging over the last umpteen years. Back when I started in 2002, it was completely free-form, and I wrote about absolutely anything I wanted, in any form that I wanted. The range of topics and forms that work for Forbes is much narrower, particularly when the question of money gets brought in, because, to put it bluntly, I get paid by the click, and so naturally want to maximize the clicks-per-post.

And, at the moment, there’s basically zero overlap between the sort of thing I might like to write, and the sort of thing that people will click on and read. I could probably generate endless traffic by cycling through a handful of topics over and over. Week one, quantum interpretations; week two, EPR/Bell’s theorem/non-locality; week three, something about cosmology or high energy physics; week four, philosophy of science. Lather, rinse, walk in front of a bus because I’m so sick of all of these.

The other thing that “works” in the sense of driving traffic is the news hit, a quick explainer about some recent high-profile result. But here we run into the problem that I’ve never had any interest in being a journalist. I can do quickie news stories about recent results, but there are lots of other people who can do them just as well, and they probably enjoy it more than I do.

Back in the more free-wheeling heyday of Scienceblogs, my value add was to do a really deep dive on the details of news-y papers in my field, digging into the technical details you won’t get from a Dennis Overbye or Kenneth Change. That doesn’t fly as well at Forbes, for a whole bunch of reasons, most of them relating to the fact that Forbes is a high-profile company and thus feels more bound by standards and practices regarding the use of images. I can’t just grab a data graph out of a paper on the arxiv and paste it into the post the way I did circa 2010, and if I’m not doing that kind of detailed discussion, I don’t feel like I’m adding all that much. And making my own versions of figures that are relevant and important to doing a deeper explanation is a slog.

The deepest problem, though, goes back to the “lost golden age” thing, which is that back when I started in the blogging game, writing a blog felt like participation in a conversation, if not a community. And it just doesn’t, any more. This was driven home this morning when I saw a pair of old-school posts, one from Timothy Burke, the other from Matt Reed. The actual subject matter hardly matters; what hit me was that they’re talking to each other, and I hadn’t completely realized how much I missed that aspect of the ancient blogosphere.

In theory, this conversational aspect of things still exists, it’s just moved to Twitter. That doesn’t entirely work, though, because Twitter is deliberately ephemeral. In the language of remote instruction that we’ve all been forced to learn in 2020, Twitter is a synchronous medium, rewarding live in-the-moment engagement, while blogs are asynchronous, something you can come back to hours or days later.

While I do use Twitter, probably a bit too much, the synchronous aspect of it doesn’t really work for me. The peak times for Twitter engagement, at least for Americans like me, are during the hours when I’m feeding the kids, getting them to bed, and going to sleep myself. The times when I’m readily available to engage on Twitter are 6-10am Eastern US time, which is a great time to engage with people who are really upset about UK politics and Australians who have stayed up too late.

I do post stuff to Twitter, and when I blog things that I want people to read, I’ll post and re-post links to them at later hours. Hardly anyone actually clicks through, though, and there’s rarely much in the way of conversation. So a thing that used to be a huge piece of the experience is pretty well gone.

Putting all that together, blogging has started to feel a bit like screaming into the void. A void that I have to go down a rickety flight of stairs into a damp and low-ceilinged basement to yell at. And at some point, it just didn’t seem worth bothering to do that.

I’m not officially resigning or anything like that– I will eventually have a new book to promote– and it may well be that some near-future event will motivate me to start blogging again. If nothing else, the Nobel announcements are coming in early October, and it’s always possible they’ll give the Physics prize to something that really excites me. For the last few months, though, every time I’ve started to contemplate writing a post, it’s seemed more like a dreary obligation than something fun to do, and, you know, I started this to be a fun hobby, not another job. I’ll pick it back up when it seems like fun again.