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Jonathan Rauch, guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan's, waves a red cape in front of the blogger bulls:
If some strange magnetic pulse wiped out every blog post written since the format began, hardly anything memorable or important would be lost; and, after 15 years or whatever, it's too late to hope for maturation. The medium is the problem. The Web is great for shopping and research, but intrinsically lousy for serious reading and writing. Over the past decade and more, the most striking fact about the blogosphere is how little it has produced of distinction or durability.I'm guessing he woke up and said,, "I wonder if I could become the most famous person in the blogosphere today?", and this is how he decided to do it. The appropriate response isn't "No way, you tool, blogging is awesome!" It's the one Kevin Drum gives:
It's pretty much true, of course, since your average blog post is about as durable as a story in a daily newspaper, and you know what they say about yesterday's news, don't you? It's also pretty much true of the weekly column writing business, though I suppose you can at least collect those in a book and pretend that they've found immortality that way.This is a feature both of the medium and the topic. My parents, who you'll be shocked to learn are extremely fond of my writing, often tell me, "You should take your columns and put them in a book!" But who would want to read a book of columns from a year or two ago? Much of the time, you wouldn't want to read a column from a month ago. That's the trouble with politics: it changes very quickly, and the things that are pressing today quickly fade into irrelevance. Even books about politics become outdated quickly. Believe me -- I've written a couple just in the last few years that no one in the their right mind would bother picking up today, because they've become irrelevant.I suspect that when Rauch is describing "blogs," what he really means is "blogs about stuff I'm interested in," i.e. politics. There are untold numbers of blogs about art, literature, science, philosophy, linguistics, auto repair, and anything else you could imagine, and among all the trillions of words are some that will stand the test of time. But that's the bargain when you write about politics: in a matter of weeks or months, even your most brilliant insights are going to be forgotten. If you want your writing to persist through the ages, you'd be better off writing novels.
