2017: The Year in Review – Part 1: Blogging

So here we are at the end of December, time for our now-traditional annual retrospective.

Any hopes that I may have harboured that our 10th anniversary back in May would inspire a period of reinvigorated creativity were fairly quickly dashed, but we have managed to stagger on after a fashion. It’s a while now since we more or less abandoned our original virtual-world theme, but my plan to reinvent SLS as a home for political and cultural commentary has never really taken off. I could spend the rest of this post listing the many, many topics I could, and should, have covered this year, notably the Brexit shambles and the ongoing nightmare of the Trump administration, but it seems more useful to try to identify what stopped me converting the opinions which I very definitely had about all these developments into written form.

I think the central problem is the tension between my feeling that I need to take some time to consider an issue, and the equally pressing sensation that events are moving at a pace that requires an instant response. I’m not sure to what extent this is the consequence of an actual increase in the volume of information that we are subjected to these days, and how much is due to the inability of my ageing brain to keep up as well as it used to, but the end result has been a state of intellectual paralysis, where I get part-way through formulating a position, before being overwhelmed by a dispiriting realisation that the moment has passed, and I need to start thinking about the next thing.

I have tried to overcome this by limiting my exposure to new, distracting stimuli – I gave up looking at Facebook altogether for a while, though I have subsequently allowed myself strictly rationed access – but, as can be seen from my very poor output this year, it hasn’t really worked. I guess I’ll just have to try to be a bit more selective about what is worth posting about, and not worry so much about being topical.

Anyway, for the record, here are our top ten posts by traffic for the year:

1. Second Life demographics – a brief review
2. Free Pussy Riot!
3. Watching the Okhrana
4. There is no land beyond the Volga
5. No man is an island
6. Bastille Day 1989
7. On Second Life and addiction
8. Trouble in paradise
9. All Stars
10. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

And here are my favourites from the last twelve months:

• Well, how did I get here?
• Trouble in paradise
• They shoot Youtubers, don’t they?
• King of the Living Dead
• Grant Hart RIP
• Red October

Finally, our top ten (out of 47) countries for visitors:

1. United States
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. New Zealand
5. France
6. Germany
7. Spain
8. India
9. Norway
10. Hong Kong

Next up, 2017 in culture.