Do people read blogs anymore? I mean, I guess they do, but do people read my blog anymore? I sometimes feel as though there’s not really a point to it anymore. Unless it’s on Facebook or Twitter, no one really seems to care these days. And that’s fine, I get it, I’ve moved on myself. Maybe we were never as interested in what other people had to say in the first place and were just dying to have them cut it down to 140 characters or less. Maybe all we wanted to do was tag other people in photos of ourselves so they’d come gaze upon our awesome selves. Who knows?

I look back on my Livejournal, which I actively used from 2005 to 2008, and it’s a pretty accurate documenting of my entire life for that period. I’m not sure what makes every other blogging platform I’ve used since shutting that down to the public so much less effective. I suppose it may dovetail with my adoption of Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Maybe it has to do with the loss of Livejournal’s “community” aspect. I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t think what I have to say or do is as interesting anymore on a day-to-day basis. Of course, if that were the case, why would I have updated my Twitter status more than 23,000 times since late 2008?

On the flip side, I’ve noticed my Google Reader, which I use to regularly peruse my favorite blogs and webcomics, doesn’t fill up as fast as it used to. In general, people seem to be blogging far less frequently, and I know I’ve unsubscribed to a number of blogs as time has passed, mainly because I realized I wasn’t ever reading them, either for lack of time or lack of interest.

This isn’t news, of course. A casual web search for “blogging is dead” will return a large number of articles and, ironically, of course, blog posts about the subject. But for me, it leads me to wonder “what’s next?” For a society that seems so obsessed with knowing what everyone is doing at every moment, we seem far less concerned with what those people are actually thinking or feeling. Does this paradigm shift speak to a larger societal issue, that of our dwindling compassion for others? Our collective shrinking attention span? Our inability to invest in anything outside of Lost and reality TV?

Or maybe we’re just bored with blogs. Carry on.