Recently, after many years, I found the author of a blog I loved a dozen years ago on Instagram ( Elisse z Utkane z Marzeń). The character-limited posts on Insta cannot possibly contain the author’s rich thoughts and her characteristic chatty style, which is so wonderful to read! I dug back into the blog and went through the whole thing from top to bottom.
The amount of thoughts after a few days of reading filled my brain. Not only those about life, work and home, but also about the way we use the Internet today as creators and consumers of content. How things have changed over the years!
From longer forms such as blog posts, giving time for reflection and tracing the path from cause to result, we have jumped (me for sure!) into the days of content fast food accompanied by a pretty photo or a dynamic video with catchy music. Brilliant advice in five steps, 3 ways to change your life in 3 minutes….
So enjoyable to watch, and even if the advice is not dumb, so what if instead of a moment’s reflection there is a swipe of the thumb up across the screen and a skip to the next more or less dorky video? I wonder when was the last time I made the slightest effort to implement any of these ‘revolutionary’ solutions into my life. I can’t recall.
Meanwhile, while reading Elisse’s posts, my thoughts, somewhere along the way, turned into action. Day after day, changes sneaked into my home routine. Was it due to the Author’s wise stories served up in a fun, light-hearted format? Her brisk words: unstructured, not divided into headings, bullet points and lists, so loved today by SEO optimization and Google search? Perhaps because of the time, spent reading and reflecting?
Good, old blog days
No one cared about keywords and shared their passions and knowledge freely, unconstrained by plenty of marketing rules, brand strategies, and content agendas. It was all about the pure joy of creating.
Reading it felt like grabbing coffee with the author: a moment for reflection, gossip, glimpses of cool solutions, and inspiration. These posts were like favorite sections in a magazine. I didn’t feel like I was consuming “content.” With the obligatory switch to a more informal tone to to the reader to shorten the distance and more easily persuade them to buy.
All these rules, separate for each platform, the need to define a niche, to create under an algorithm (so that someone can bump into us in the abysses of the web), so effective from a marketing point of view, are deadly for the joy of creation. I see it on my blog, Instagram and YouTube. I see it happening to others.
I also get terribly tired of this need to define who you are. Preferably in two sentences, entertaining and with a flair. Once you’ve done this, stick to it like the Ten Commandments (10 is too many! choose a maximum of 3!), because if your Instagram feeds are different in terms of subject matter, style or techniques – Mr. Algorithm, who sees everything, will inevitably punish you with a drop in reach or a shadow ban.
And be sure to use only safe words!
And don’t talk about sad, difficult or controversial things. Why would anyone want to do that? Have you noticed in YT how often creators mute words? Or use increasingly fancy replacements? I have the impression that these ‘dangerous’ words are multiplying by the day and sometimes, when watching an interview, it’s hard to know what is actually being talked about. I think we have long since passed the level of restrictions from the communist era in Poland…
I’ve had my fill! And that’s the kind of post I wanted to write today. Instead of another step-by-step tutorial that hangs somewhere in a folder of sketches, unfinished…Although it would certainly be more useful, I simply have something else going on in my soul today.
We used to post about this kind of things 🙂
I would also love to read what blogs you have visited most often? Which ones do you visit still? Which ones make you want to do something more? Do they make you grab your crayons and paintbrushes or shovel and go digging in the garden? It would be fun to get to know such places!
