A blog? Does anyone blog anymore?? Isn’t that incredibly outdated??? I hear you, dear loud-thinking reader. I hear you, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe there is a place for blogging, even in this overcrowded age of the internet, where every website and app is constantly competing for your eyeballs and you have 50 other tabs open wanting your attention (right now I have 23 including this one, could be worse).
And yes, I hear you ask, what is even the point of writing anything yourself anymore, when LLMs can whip up a convincing academic essay from the most poorly misspelled prompt, then translate it into iambic pentameter at the cost of just a few drops of water and watt-hours of electricity (which adds up, of course). Doesn’t this completely devalue writing?
Weirdly my feeling has been, well, now that AI could be writing anything, somehow the value of human-written words feels a lot higher. These words, right now, are forming in my brain a bit faster than I can type them out on my tappy keyboard. Then a bit of copying and pasting and uploading and downloading, and now you dear reader are absorbing them into your brain probably about as fast as I thought them (definitely faster than I typed them). But it feels to me important, that these words came directly from my brain, and now they’re filtering through yours.
This, it seems to me, is the value of writing now - human writing, with all its minor errors and idiosyncrasies and slightly too-long sentences here and there. And since the demise of twitter I have lost faith in any externally hosted social media platform (read more on social media and academia in this new landscape from the Thesis Whisperer here). It’s nice to know that I won’t have to suddenly delete this all when Nazis take over (one reason I’m using my own website rather than any pre-made platform like substack).
Plus, since I got going in science I have found and devoured many an academic blog, and found them really helpful in filling in the context around the science that gets published in journals. You might say I’m a long-time lurker, first time poster. Some of my favourites (biased towards my interests in ecology and pollination) include:
So, here I am, a human on the internet.
I can’t promise that I’ll post here frequently, given all the many other demands on my time, but it’s nice to have this place to put my thoughts and musings, on research and ecology and whatever else I feel strongly enough to write about.
Here goes!