"And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."
As a fan of purple prose, I think that passage was lovely. I'm not here to quibble about what blogging might mean in 20 years or sell people new ideas like a mad gold-miner outside an barren cave, but I still can't let Butterworth act that smug.
Blogging isn't a tomb, it's a way to grab readers in this media-swamped world. I'm not saying newspapers will die or that blogging will make me rich. I'm out here trying to find the people that want to read the kind of things I like to write. As a writer, all I can do is find my readers with my web work.
When the time comes to publish something bigger, I can bring you along with me...
Act smug? Never! One is or isn't - and that I'll leave to your judgement. I do have to thank Tennyson for the last line tho!
One of my original ideas was to parse the blogosphere through Nietzsche's dialectic of the Apollonian and Dionysian. But I went with Chthonic tragedy rather than the Attic variety LOL!
Best - Trevor Butterworth
Posted by: Trevor Butterworth | February 21, 2006 1:36 PM | Permalink to Comment