Did Facebook Kill the Blogging Star?

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A new report says blogging has decreased among younger generations. Social media may be to blame.

While more and more people are emailing and making travel reservations online, not everyone is blogging like they used to.

According to the Pew “Generations 2010” report, “Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline—a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites.”

True, older generations are blogging more, contributing to a slight overall rise in the rate of blogging among adults. But as they increasingly log on to social networking sites as well, perhaps they too will shed the blog bug. (If you recently received a friend request from Grandpa, you may not be surprised to know that the fastest growing group on such sites, according to this report, are those Internet users 74 years-young and up. In 2008, 4% of them used social network sites; the figure has since quadrupled, to 16%).

(Facebook Backlash: 10 Reasons to UnFriend Someone)

It’s not, of course, that we’ve suddenly decided we didn’t need to broadcast our every thought and movement to the world; that we’ve judged privacy to be a worthwhile principle; that we’ve elected to step back and reflect on our lives before publishing them. Come on! We’ve just found even quicker, easier, briefer ways to do it.

As the report notes, “while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.”

Someday soon, will we find ourselves longing for that lengthy, introspective piece of writing that was the blog entry? (via Gawker)