Monday, July 20, 2009
Blog of Ages
I don't suppose that “blog” counts as a new word any more, even if it doesn't appear in Dr. Johnson's dictionary or the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I am told that the first web log appeared in 1994, long enough ago that many of my students have never been conscious of a world without blogs.
The advantage of the blog over the old-fashioned diary, of course, is that you don't have to wait until you're famous and dead (or at least dead; the diary might make you famous) before your thoughts are available to millions of people. And most blogs are, like most diaries, the boring everyday thoughts of people who are fundamentally uninteresting.
A few blogs, perhaps several hundred out of the millions on the Internet, cover particular topics interestingly, and even fewer are the models of interesting minds at work.
This mode of journaling is not entirely new. The medium is new, but not the idea of recording for the public what you happen to think about various issues. A newspaper column is a form of blog, even when it is not (as this is) posted on the Web. Some newspaper bloggers have become famous and influential for their writings, from Walter Winchell to Grantland Rice to Walter Kerr, influencing how Americans thought about politics or sports, or what theater they saw.
Ultimately, all of us bloggers, in print or newer media, are the children of Samuel Johnson and The Rambler. It's true that Johnson himself considered himself the successor to Addison and Steele's Spectator, and he was correct in that The Rambler came out regularly (twice a week; The Spectator was a daily) and consisted of a single essay in each issue. But The Spectator was not the work of a single hand, was intended to provide material for polite conversation, and took on something of the form of a collection of short stories.
The Rambler, on the other hand, ran to more serious meditations on those issues that seized Johnson's imagination from day to day. The first few in the selection I'm currently reading include the realistic novel, marriage, stoicism, pastoral poetry, sorrow, and biography--not a bad summary of Johnson's interests and life in a few words, and he revisited some of those issues many times. (I know, it omits the dictionary, but I said “not bad,” not “perfect.”)
There are 208 essays in The Rambler, and another 104 in The Idler, written on deadline 1750-52 and 1758-60 (the Idler essays were weekly) in his spare time; he was working on the dictionary and his annotated edition of Shakespeare in those same years. Boswell describes (with some amazement) Johnson dashing off one of those essays in half an hour the day before it was to appear. This is how many blog posts are written today.
Of course, not many of us can dash off a blog post as elegant and well reasoned as most of Johnson's, and mine, at least, take considerably more than half an hour. But even though his have been collected and republished often in the last two and a half centuries, they had the same ephemeral intention as our blog posts and columns.
The difference now, really, is that anyone with an e-mail account can have a blog. Anyone with a web site can “publish” a book. The type of material isn't new (not even hypertext is new), only the medium, and the ability to spew our work out into the unfiltered universe. We've entered a new era in how we think about writing. Are all blogs created equal? How do we deal with the availability of so much information, other than by choosing to ignore whole continents of it?
But I'm out of space. I'll have to revisit this issue later.
The advantage of the blog over the old-fashioned diary, of course, is that you don't have to wait until you're famous and dead (or at least dead; the diary might make you famous) before your thoughts are available to millions of people. And most blogs are, like most diaries, the boring everyday thoughts of people who are fundamentally uninteresting.
A few blogs, perhaps several hundred out of the millions on the Internet, cover particular topics interestingly, and even fewer are the models of interesting minds at work.
This mode of journaling is not entirely new. The medium is new, but not the idea of recording for the public what you happen to think about various issues. A newspaper column is a form of blog, even when it is not (as this is) posted on the Web. Some newspaper bloggers have become famous and influential for their writings, from Walter Winchell to Grantland Rice to Walter Kerr, influencing how Americans thought about politics or sports, or what theater they saw.
Ultimately, all of us bloggers, in print or newer media, are the children of Samuel Johnson and The Rambler. It's true that Johnson himself considered himself the successor to Addison and Steele's Spectator, and he was correct in that The Rambler came out regularly (twice a week; The Spectator was a daily) and consisted of a single essay in each issue. But The Spectator was not the work of a single hand, was intended to provide material for polite conversation, and took on something of the form of a collection of short stories.
The Rambler, on the other hand, ran to more serious meditations on those issues that seized Johnson's imagination from day to day. The first few in the selection I'm currently reading include the realistic novel, marriage, stoicism, pastoral poetry, sorrow, and biography--not a bad summary of Johnson's interests and life in a few words, and he revisited some of those issues many times. (I know, it omits the dictionary, but I said “not bad,” not “perfect.”)
There are 208 essays in The Rambler, and another 104 in The Idler, written on deadline 1750-52 and 1758-60 (the Idler essays were weekly) in his spare time; he was working on the dictionary and his annotated edition of Shakespeare in those same years. Boswell describes (with some amazement) Johnson dashing off one of those essays in half an hour the day before it was to appear. This is how many blog posts are written today.
Of course, not many of us can dash off a blog post as elegant and well reasoned as most of Johnson's, and mine, at least, take considerably more than half an hour. But even though his have been collected and republished often in the last two and a half centuries, they had the same ephemeral intention as our blog posts and columns.
The difference now, really, is that anyone with an e-mail account can have a blog. Anyone with a web site can “publish” a book. The type of material isn't new (not even hypertext is new), only the medium, and the ability to spew our work out into the unfiltered universe. We've entered a new era in how we think about writing. Are all blogs created equal? How do we deal with the availability of so much information, other than by choosing to ignore whole continents of it?
But I'm out of space. I'll have to revisit this issue later.
