Five Years Before the Social Masthead

 

I started in with social media well before I heard the term in use. It was five years ago when, newly retired and both wondering what to do through yet another long dark winter, my movie and coffee shop pal, Wayne, suggested we get into blogging about what we’d each come to believe on our long life journeys. Maybe that big bulge of Boomers coming up right below us seniors would find our thoughts resonated with them? In those not-that-far-off days, Booming was still a big new thing, and its zippier manifestation, Zooming, was just coming into the the world, courtesy of Moses Znaimer’s media empire.

Wayne came up with an appropriately serious-sounding moniker for this blog, ‘Musings of an Aging Boomer’, and I our obscure tag line, ‘A Senior Perspective on the Evolution of Western Values since IBM Selectrics and Rock-and-Roll were young’. Though my partner dropped out of posting when that winter ended, I have soldiered on, shifting the blog onto my own domain to highlight the solo nature of its authorship. 

We are up to 136 posts now and my followership goes up and down, but is never a lot. I began this blog with a view to honing a writing style and to explore content ideas for longer opinion pieces. That is where I presently remain. Ninety-eight percent of blogs attract a tiny readership and, while this is one of the more durable Boomer blogs, commentary on everyday life and times is not easy to monetize with cautious late middle age folk who often have only a dim idea or none at all of how to find good writing of interest on the Web.  Without readership there will be no sponsorship to pay for spending time on developing well-written and satisfying posts.

These days I manage a couple of additional blogs. These are not personal but subject related, and content is at least partly provided by third parties. Their subjects of authorship and heritage attract a wider crowd than my personal musings.

About a year ago, I realised that I had better find out what some of the more recently developed social media options than now-mature blogging were all about. This was so that I could decide where, if at all, they could help my authorial efforts. What to choose?  I had already joined LinkedIn years ago so I just needed to revamp my profile to fit my state in life, and start posting again. I added Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, the last at that point in time still much reviled by many pundits as mindless.

As an older person in an age category where Facebook (FB) use is still low, my very modest number of thirty-two ‘friends’ who are actual people (rather than an organization) are a heterogeneous lot, and largely not representative of my personal friendships. In contrast, my thirty-something-year-old kids have pretty well all their real-life acquaintances in their age group using FB regularly as the primary way they all stay in touch.

In addition to maintaining my own personal Timeline, I monitor ten Facebook groups that reflect my recreational interests. Sad to say that the very substantial memberships of most of these communities (some are well beyond a 1,000 members) are mostly middle-aged. Having hobbies is becoming a dated concept that may never catch on with our youngest adult age cohort, the so-called Millennials.

The Promise of Blogging

Blogging as an online form of diarising and journaling is now 20 years old. I have been at it for the last five of them and find there is still a lot for me to learn about how to make online journalism deliver thought-provoking alternative perspectives to our subscribers. Excellence in blogging is not easy: “The reality is that most blogs are poorly managed, attract dismal readership numbers and are soon abandoned. Does this mean that blogging is dead? Of course not! It just means it’s not easy. Like most things in business, the blogging market is subject to the basic principles of supply and demand” - Heather Baker of the B2B PR Blog.  

If more of us understood that, to hold onto their followers, blogs must deliver a lot more to readers than unformed opinions and ignorant rants, we bloggers could have a better chance of becoming a part of more people’s daily reading diet. Another Heather, Heather Yaxley of Greenbanana, says it well: “In an increasingly competitive world for individuals and organisations, it is not enough to simply be able to ‘do’ things or even to do them well. You need to be able to know why something is the right thing to do – and be able to explain this to others”.  

In this blog we strive to bring you a varied diet of perspectives on life and world events as seen from a mature 'First World' English-speaker's viewpoint. In this era of sociopolitical all-inclusiveness, we believe there is too much reluctance to proselytize our pride in Western values and viewpoints as developed over many hundreds of years of slow democratization and declining injustice. If our sometimes whimsical and sometimes hard-nosed take on standing up for such values generally intrigues you, do please let your friends and contacts know about us! And follow us regularly yourself by using 'Join this site' or the 'Follow by Email -> Submit' link, or by connecting via Google+, all in the right side column. If you like to subscribe to blogs via feeds, look for the RSS symbol in the header bar to click on. See you next post!

The Blame Game

We blog here about the experience of being a boomer.

One of those experiences is to function as whipping boy for the ills of the generations behind. A national columnist called Gary Mason leads the local newspaper blame brigade. His latest tirade starts: “When is an economic recovery not an economic recovery? When you’re among the hundreds of thousands of young people being left out of any revival in the jobs market.”  Follow along and once again one quickly finds it's all our fault as selfish and uncaring boomers.

The comment thread on this particular rant is huge and much of it is about just who's to blame.  I especially enjoyed this riposte by a fellow calling himself  'Cosmic Wheels': -

New Year’s (Resolutions?)

This year I did not make any New Year’s Resolutions. I followed the example of my wise wife and decided to live this year based on a motto. This year’s motto for me is “Positive Rants Only”.

By the sixth of January I have already been challenged several times to live with this new motto. I belong to a 'Men's Group' which has been meeting every two weeks for the last 20 years. During the discussion we were having I decided that one of the other members was looking at the world the wrong way and he needed to be informed of his ignorance, i.e. not knowing. I proceeded to point out to him all the things he was misinformed about, how he just didn’t understand the whole idea, how he did not have enough experience to see the whole picture, and how he must have received his knowledge by reading the 'Encyclopedia of Misinformation'. Boy, did I have a good time. I was eloquent, passionate, involved, charismatic and in the flow.I was really into explaining how he had gotten it wrong and how I was right. 

I then told the group about my new motto and for some reason they all laughed. I did tell the group that my response may not have been the best positive rant. 

Please be supportive, it takes at least twenty-one days create a new habit.