A Lasting Blog

February 19, 2006

The ephemeral nature of a blog was a topic yesterday on Andrew Sullivan’s site—see here. The response on the part of Sullivan is also telling, which is to point to the similarly ephemeral nature of newspapers. The day-to-day stories and opinions that make up a newspaper are here and then gone.. yesterday’s newspapers are the reserve of historians, not active readers. So ok, blogs are no more ephemeral than newspapers, but that hardly seems a defense of blogging..

Today I saw that the defense had become more articulated. According to Sullivan, the act of blogging is a form of conversation, and just as speech slips away, never to be recovered, so the billions of words set loose on the internet will be lost. Yet all this chatter nevertheless constitutes the democratic conversation, the slow-motion act of formulating views.

Agreed, but I also think he underestimates the lasting value of the form, at least in potential. I am not convinced that the per capita writing quotient has actually advanced in the last few years, despite exponential growth in online writing.. think of all the handwritten journals and letters. The lasting value of a blog will be directly related to the lasting value of the ideas expressed in that blog. Any series of blogs with the imaginative sharpness of the entries in Coleridge’s Notebooks would be worthy of poring over far into the future.

As blogs center on the daily blips in our political life.. the shooting accidents and minor uproars of the recent days.. they become ephemeral. But as they approach principles and central issues, they can gain lasting value. It need hardly be said that this “lasting value” is the goal of this series of blogs.