I guess this Bravus blog has been dead for a while now – there have been occasional intimations of life every few months, but it’s functionally moribund.

People are talking about blogging as a dead medium, and I guess it is… I know I don’t get the urge to write them any more, and I seldom read them.

I suspect it’s the instant gratification of social media that has done the murder: if I have an idea I will usually pop it on Twitter if it’s short or Facebook if it’s a little longer (and being aware of the slightly different audiences on those two media) and get instant reactions, rather than write a longer piece like a blog post.

The blog has been useful to keep around for the instances when (a) I know I’ve written something more detailed on a topic and want to link that to a Facebook or Twitter discussion or (b) I want to write something longer and with more detail than Facebook is well adapted for, or that I think I might want to access again in future. I’ll probably keep it open for those reasons, but post rarely.

I’ll also keep it open as an archive: it contains a couple of thousand posts chronicling my thoughts and reactions across almost a decade, and as such I think it’s a useful ‘externalised memory’ to have available for myself and others.

Thanks to all those who read it in the past, and who dig into it in the present and future, or who I send here with links – reading is the ‘third moment of ethnography’ that makes the writing worth doing.

But I guess this is really ‘vale’ to the Bravus Blog – may it requiescat in pace.