Actually, it’s not just blogging. It’s all of our social media because social media has changed how we share our inner worlds.
There’s a graphic going around called “How to quench your social media thirst in sixty minutes a day“. It’s clever, listing out time spent on various social networks.
But for me, the shock was seeing that top of the list, the most vital ingredient, was “Content Curation”. Blogging came equal with it, but listed second.
Content curation is a concept that’s been around a while, but I think it’s coming in from the cold now. People are seeing it as an act of creation in and of itself. The value-add of re-sharing others’ product is that the curator makes meaning out of all the noise in social media. This is storytelling via an editorial role. As curators, we make a promise to people that what we share has value, and is part of the bigger story of who we are.
Over at The Walkleys, they’ve published the results of a study on what and where people share stuff. People are building and protecting their personal brand, and it’s about belonging.
Which brings me back to the title of this post, Blogging Changes Your Life.
Before social media — Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter — a lot of our daily life experiences were private not because they had to be (in terms of protecting our vulnerabilities), but because NO one would listen to us babble endlessly about our minute by minute perceptions. Now we can. Tech has enabled us. And so we do.
People duck in and out of our life stream, building a picture of who we are. The challenge in all of this is for us to be authentic.
Fortunately, the more we pay attention to what we share of our lives via social media, the more aware we can become of the beauty in our lives. Social media can actually build mindfulness.
A photo of a wonderful meal we’ve just cooked, a recording of a bird song (I really want to share the black-faced cuckoo shrike warbling away, but he won’t sing on demand!), little things that bring pleasure to the day and that maybe we once took for granted. Sharing these things emphasises their value and we realise we are blessed.
Blogging changes our lives — not least because of the people near and far who join our lives online 🙂