A (subjective) history of blogging

In the good old days, a few select people learned the secret art of writing longhand and spent their dreary days in cold chambers scribbling like Bartleby with quill pens on paper made from bleached rags.  What they scribbled was mostly legal documents and copies of Latin texts, but a few squalid individuals wrote other things on their own, and learned to exult in the creation of quiet linguistic music.

After Gutenberg, some members of the "noble" classes had the time and imagination to use writing as a tool for reflection and for creation of more silent music.  For everyone else of that era, life was nasty, brutish and short enough to preclude most opportunities for appreciation of what the scribblers had written.  Both the writing and reading of literature were the exclusive, leisurely pursuits of a wealthy class with time on its hands.  (Oblomov, the central character of Ivan Goncharov's novel of that name, requires the first hundred and fifty pages to get out of bed in the morning, and while Goncharov's intent may have been satirical, it only proves the point.)

Then along came Myron J. Qwertyuiop, the inventor of the mechanical typewriter, and everything changed.  Because of his invention, anyone could learn how to hammer away at the clacky keys, and the age of the dime novel and journalistic hack was begun.  Bound volumes of mediocre writing coagulated in libraries, and a new type of emporium called bookstores came into being.  As a result of all this proliferation, all sorts of printed matter started showing up on bedside tables, train platforms, public lavatories, and everywhere else.  Books propagated like rabbits, like coat hangers in the closet of human habitation.

When the computer age hit the big-time back in the early 1980's, the floodgates opened wider.  Some feindishly obsessed programmer who couldn't get a date (Dan Bricklin?) invented the word processor, which turned out to be so easy to use and so helpful for rearranging sentences and paragraphs (editing) that everybody who had previously been usefully employed in food preparation and shoe sales started cranking out poems, stories, screenplays and long-form novels.  Library shelves groaned under the weight of the massive new production, publishers stopped editing for literary quality, and the excess volume of printed output was offloaded to Barnes & Noble, which metastisized across the landscape like a fast-acting cancer.

The final stage occurred on the internet, when Dave Weiner (among others?) invented the weblog, and within a few short years, everybody on the planet became a "published author," including me.  I promised myself that I wasn't going to do this, but here I am only three days later, clacking away on keys whose labels are mostly worn away, blogging again.

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Humor:

It may already be old hat to some folks, but blogging is still new enough that the French haven't invented their own word for it yet.