Blog Revolution?

This post is in reply to an article and commentary that appears on David Gulbransen’s “Preaching to the Perverted” blog. Click here for the original post and comments. Check back there for any additional comments too.

I’ve been thinking about David’s post throughout the day today. The idea of the blog as a journal or diary or even a column is not new or revolutionary. However, although it *is* in many cases journal, diary, or column, the blog – which is really just a web based form of all of these – actually does become a lot more *because* of the blog’s ease of publication, wide reach, and permanence.

Ease of publication.
I’m sure there’s no argument from anyone on this. With services like Radio and Blogger (to name just two) you write, click, and publish. I think it would take me more effort to find where I put a paper journal, then find a working pen, open the cover, and actually start the manual process of writing. These days, at least for me, I type faster than I write and the tennis elbow actually prefers to avoid the strain of using a pen. Heck, without blogs, I’d never be replying to Dave’s idea and this conversation wouldn’t exist – especially if his article was in a printed publication. I’m not really a “letter to the editor” kind of guy.

Wide reach.
The Internet vs. a paper journal on my bedside table. I’m not sure I’m zoned for that much traffic through my bedroom. No comments from the peanut gallery, please.

Permanence.
Historians are going to have a field day with all the archived blog material – even within the next generation. Think about what we have from the World War II era. We have popular media in the form of newspaper articles and newsreels for the most part. Part of the problem with that is the very essence of popular media is, well, it’s POPULAR media. Remember that, on the whole, history is written by the victors and everything else gets buried. Aside from the popular media, we go absolutely gaga when we come across written personal accounts – caches of letters, memos, and soldier’s diaries, for example. Can you say Anne Frank’s diary? Just imagine if we had archived blogs from around the world from this time period!

It sounds kind of silly but all of us who blog have become in some way social historians. What we write is commentary on our life and times. Yes, even the inane stuff – which is kind of the equivalent of pottery shards to archaeologists, I suppose.

At first I kind of agreed with Dave on pooh-poohing the revolution and just wanted to point out the merits of blogging on writing, reading, and learning. But then I started thinking, what is a revolution? I did the lazy man’s Google-definition and got the following:

“Revolution: a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving.”

The very stats Dave presented on how many blogs there are and how quickly they are being created is pretty extreme and quite a force if you consider the sheer amount of words and ideas being pushed out for public consumption. “Extreme” and “forceful”, if you do another Google definition, are the words that come up when you define “drastic”. So far as “far-reaching” – I’m writing to an Internet crowd, so come on, no contest. When it comes to “thinking and behaving” – once again I point to the stats. With the sheer number of blogs in existence and so many being created every day, I’d say there’s a definite affect on thought and behavior.

I think Dave and I and a lot of the people we know are pretty jaded when it comes to tech and we especially don’t buy into a lot of media dogma on matters in our own backyard. Not to mention it feels silly to me, at least, to walk around talking about a “revolution”. I feel like grabbing a loaf of French bread and talking about the bourgeois and proletariat. To our savvy group, the internet plus writing is kind of a “duh” concept. However, after considerable thought on this topic, I’m left with one thing.

Viva la revolution! 😉