slowing down in a time of relentless content consumption

Can we bring blogging back please?

When I was 11, I started keeping a diary (mainly thanks to Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series, which was the first ever young adult series I read.) I scribbled all day and all night in it, under my desk in class, under the covers in bed with the help of a flashlight, etc. I emptied my day-to-day thoughts—which was surprisingly a lot for an 11-year-old—in those notebooks and gradually found my voice there.

(Teenage Joyce was obsessed with this series. Michael Moscovitz was my first ever book crush, cus duh, who wouldn’t crush on him?)

When I was 14, I created my first blog on Blogspot and blogged every other day while still writing in my physical diary. (I was a teenager, I had a lot of BIG FEELINGS™, okay?)

When I was 17, I stopped keeping a physical diary and focused on blogging. (I also threw away ALL my diaries because I cringed whenever I read back on them. Also, there were A LOT of them, which took up significant cupboard space.)

Up until 2016, I was blogging fairly regularly, at least once a week. I even set up a short story blog with a couple of writer friends (hi,

Meredith

and

Nicole

!) and we kept that going for a good while, posting monthly short stories.)

Fast forward to 2024, and all those years of carrying a notebook everywhere I went and writing page after page of diary entries have become a thing of my past. Somewhere along the way, blogging also fell by the wayside as schoolwork got heavier and later work got hectic.

These days, I’m camping out mostly on social apps—namely, Instagram, TikTok, and now Threads too. (I’m @joycechuawrites, hi.) It just seemed more convenient to take a snapshot of whatever I was doing/eating/meeting, slap a caption on, and publish it as a quick story or post.

But in a time where we are inundated with TikTok videos and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts and videos and podcasts and Threads, um, threads and other bite-sized, easily digestible content, our brains become wired to seek more dopamine hits—we scroll to the next story, the next video, over and over until we look up and realise an hour or two have passed. Our attention spans shorten over time without us realising it, and we instinctively turn to our phones whenever we have a pocket of spare time or feel even remotely unstimulated. We are so well-fed—even glutted—with content that any bit of boredom feels uncomfortable. We are now anxious things, itching to be entertained every second of the day.

I’ve certainly found myself guilty of the above: I now have an embarrassingly short attention span when I read (I can only get through a few pages before getting distracted by my phone), and every spare moment I have where my mind is unstimulated, I pull out my phone and check my notifications or socials for updates.

So, in a way, this return to blogging is an attempt to go back to the time before social media took over my life, when I was living more slowly, taking time to wander and meander alone with my thoughts, to structure my thoughts for long-form blog posts, to fully immerse in a book for an entire train ride without once checking my phone, to let my imagination run free without without feeling the anxiety and compulsion to turn it into a book or a sellable idea. To play and wonder and let my thoughts spill out onto the page again, instead of thinking about book marketing and engagement rates and career trajectories and to-do lists, etc etc etc. To write simply for the sake of expression and therapy, not to sell a product or to create a product that can be sold. (Thanks, capitalism, for commodifying everything.)

It’s been a long time since I last blogged, and I can feel that my blogging muscles have atrophied. My writing voice is clunky and my thoughts are all over the place. I’ve forgotten how to access that voice over the 2.5 years of not blogging or keeping a diary.

But every writer knows that your voice becomes clearer the more you write. You can only get better and more confident by writing more, writing consistently, and writing authentically. So here’s to regaining my voice, my focus, and my attention span again—one blog post at a time. (And here’s hoping I don’t get distracted by the next Shiny New Thing!)

Q: How do you feel like social media apps and short-form content have impacted you? Do you like this current state of content saturation or do you miss consuming longer-form content at a slower pace? Comment below!