Relaunch: Twitter Killed the Blogger Star

Hello.

If you were one of the small number of people who followed this blogger account years ago...it's been a while, hasn't it?

I fell off the blogging bandwagon; or, perhaps more accurately, the internet moved on from blogging.

People don't blog anymore; they tweet; they do Twitter threads; they write long statuses on Facebook which are shared far and wide; they say their thoughts to a camera; they talk to their phone and release it as a podcast. All these things have seemingly pushed the idea of blogging to the outskirts of internet communications.

But I'd like to get back into it. There is something about writing long-form that is different from a tweet. The writer has taken the time out to craft something, to think about the structure, and to choose the perfect words; the reader has specifically taken the time out to sit and read it. Not only that, but it is an in-depth record of how you felt at a certain time in your life, in a way that tweets often aren't.

When I was writing my Edinburgh show in 2019 - a show about being long-term unemployed, being working-class, and the demonisation of both groups of people - I looked back on some of my old blogs. These were written between 2012 and 2015*, and they helped me think of new things to write about, just by reading about how I felt back then. In that sense, those blogs were very useful, and helped shaped what my show became.

So it's a useful resource for me to get back into. I don't plan on sharing these far and wide, so it isn't a career move - I'm not crazy enough to think "I know how I will make it big! I'll become a viral blog star in 2020!" - but it will be interesting to see what I come up with, now I have opened the door to this outlet once again.

Write again soon!

Tom