July 4, 2005
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Henry Clarke Wright, proto-blogger?
Read Caleb McDaniel's article Blogging in the Early Republic.
Indeed, blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading, an insight as obvious to Tocqueville as it should be to most bloggers today. The insight is that readers, in a culture of abundant reading material, regularly seek out other readers, either by becoming writers themselves or by sharing their records of reading with others. That process, of course, requires cultural conditions that value democratic rather than deferential ideals of authority. But to explain how new habits of reading and writing develop, those cultural conditions matter as much—perhaps more—than economic or technological innovations. As Tocqueville knew, the explosion of newspapers in America was not just a result of their cheapness or their means of production, any more than the explosion of blogging is just a result of the fact that free and user-friendly software like Blogger is available. Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s words, it is the need "to see more of what is going on around me." And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at July 4, 2005 9:00 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
I myself have been more inclined to see blogs as the descendents of the old SF fanzines. It's a computer screen rather than mimeographed paper that we read it from but in many ways the spirit is still the same. ^_^
Blogs are the much more immediate descendants of USENET newsgroups and BBS's, the former which have become nearly useless due to spam (unless moderated) and the latter which have fallen into disuse because of the unwillingness of most computer users to learn telnet and the command line.
My own blog was inspired by Steven Den Beste and ESR, and prompted by my own desire to kick some ideas around and find what people are thinking on subjects of interest to me. So far, it's done middlin' well.
All the tech advances in the world wouldn't have made it happen if the cultural demand for it hadn't been there. On the other hand, where the demand _is_ there and is particularly heavy (as in the SF fanzines and the BBS and Usenet cultures, as previous commenters have noted), people will adapt the best tech available, even if relatively unsuited to their needs.
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