Five Years

It's that time of year when I clap my hand to my head – zut alors! sacre bleu! – Culture Industry has been around another year! (As the guys on NPR say, "You've wasted another perfectly good hour on Car Talk...") I could do the usual, lament the fact that my blogging has been desultory (for going on four years now), that I don't update often enough, that I haven't noticed your book (which I will, eventually) –

But this time around I do sense a sea change in the intertubes, a generalized shifting of momentum from the open-ended blog format to more quick & to the point social networking-style things. Much of my traffic gets driven from Facebook links these days, it seems, or even from tweets. And yeah, I'm less interested in updating the blog just to say that I had a great lunch but a lousy afternoon, since I can do that on Facebook & have half a dozen "friends" (most of whom I've never met) say they "like" it.

I'm still quite taken with the weblog as writing format, however: it gives me the collapsible space to post a funny footnote or natter on at length on things I know little about; it's simultaneously casual & semi-formal, like those tuxedo t-shirts that were all the rage back in the '70s. So Culture Industry remains online for the foreseeable future. I can't promise 3 updates a week, but I can promise (sometime soon) a mediation on what it means to call it the English Civil War or the English Revolution, & why it matters. As usual, my heartfelt thanks to those who keep dropping by; and warm welcomes to those who blundered here by googling "furry animal bestiality wifeswap culture."