My themes over the last year

I’ve been going through my posts from 2009 trying to identify the ones I think are the better ones. I suppose was making a kind of Top Ten list, despite my recurring griping about lists. It is not a “best of” list, however. It is a list of the ones I liked, though some may not have been all they could or should have been. It’s a favourites list, I suppose. It goes like this:

1. What Star Trek did to me
2. The class system is alive and well and now online
3. Readers have responsibilities too
4. I wonder what she’ll say today
5. Generations, transitions, moving pictures
6. Literacy is a prerequisite for independence
7. Monetizing meaning: what is content anyway?
8. Is usability kaput?
9. Who are we not hearing from?
10. The first draft is the outline

It has been an intriguing exercise. As I go through the posts I see the themes that have preoccupied me. I’ve been aware that there was some redundancy to my posts as I keep returning to certain subjects but I think this is likely true of anyone with a blog.

Here are some of the themes, observations and comments I see popping up over and over:

• What I perceive as a belief among many that social media, and the Internet generally, is ubiquitous and of a democratic nature and how that is a false belief.
• Sometimes the act of communication is more important than what is communicated.
• Social media is not tactile. We’re all in touch with each other online but we never touch each other – there is no physical contact to technological connections.

Those are the three big ones I keep seeing myself writing about. As far as the topic of writing went, my focus was a bit generic. I seemed to write more about that vague thing we call content – what is happening to traditional news, how blogs have evolved, managing social media content and so on. I was all over the map which is not unusual for me.

As an aside … I rarely make lists like the one above. I decided to do so this time as a first step in a process of going through all my posts, back to 2004, and identifying the better material. In my inept fashion, I’m trying to do a bit of online housekeeping.