RogerEvansOnline.com

It was sixteen years ago today that I began this blog. The changes in it have reflected changes in the technology and media that gave it birth. When I inaugurated it, blogs were a relatively new thing and were of far more importance than they are today. Before such social media as Facebook or Twitter, blogs were the main way of putting self-created discussion out into the world. It now seems remarkable to me that I used to blog almost daily, sometimes with quite substantial articles. With the growth of social media and the ability easily to plug into a vast panorama of interlocutors, rather than mere readers, the maintenance of a blog became far less important. I have never done anything to try to gain “followers” on Twitter, for example. Checking now, I see that I have 8,517 followers there, and I follow 972 people, as well. The Facebook “community” is different in that we receive requests from people to be their “friend.” I respond to a minority of such solicitations, since most of them come from people whom I don’t know at all. But I have 599 “friends” on Facebook, and the exchanges are typically lively and frequently carry significant information.

So I do keep this blog online but only occasionally feel that, for one reason another, I want it to be repository for something that is on my mind. Today, exactly sixteen years older than I was when I wrote that first blog post while visiting a friend at his Sarasota beach house, I look back with all kinds of feelings about what we have all seen, enjoyed, and suffered during those years.