(it was three hundred years ago)
Anyone who reads this site and also reads Mike Aquilina’s over at fathersofthechurch.com has noticed that Mike and I have almost opposite approaches to this blogging business. Mike makes a few entries every day, often just a few lines each, about whatever has attracted his attention. I tend to consider an idea for a while and compose a long article every few days. It works out just about the same in the end.
I was thinking about the whole blogging business a while ago. For the first time in history, I thought to myself, writers have the opportunity to reach out to the public directly, writing about whatever notions flit momentarily into their pretty little heads, publishing their observations almost instantly. Then I thought for a while about how the Web had completely changed the writer’s relationship with readers, putting it on a much more intimate footing. All this, I said, is completely new, a real twenty-first-century phenomenon. And then I realized that I was all wrong, and that in fact the Web has taken us backward about three centuries, back to the golden age of blogging.
You probably think I’ve slipped a cog if I’m saying the golden age of blogging was three centuries ago. But that’s because you’ve forgotten all about Addison and Steele and the dozens or hundreds like them.
I contend that what Addison, Steele, and the rest were doing all through the eighteenth century was exactly what bloggers are doing today. For people who aren’t familiar with them, let me explain. Three hundred years ago in London you could read any one of a number of “papers”—that was what they called them then—that came out daily, or two or three times a week, and covered whatever subject happened to catch the attention of the author. The Spectator, written sometimes by Joseph Addison and sometimes by Richard Steele, was the greatest of the lot, but it was only one of a large crowd. Addison himself wrote for a large number of them: the Tatler, the Guardian, the Freeholder, the Whig-Examiner, and even the Lover, in which he blogged the progress of a love affair with a cruel and obdurate lady.
I say “blogged” because the style of these papers was exactly the style of blogs today. The author might deal with a particular subject (a love affair, for example), but any idea that entered his brain was fair game for an essay. Correspondents would respond to the essays, and the author would respond to the correspondents; the next afternoon, everyone would be talking about the cleverest things the papers had said in all the coffeehouses, which in those days were where the trendy young people gathered.
So you can see why I think the main effect of the Internet revolution has been to turn twenty-first-century Pittsburgh—or wherever you happen to live—into eighteenth-century London. We have the best of both worlds now: the exciting and immediate literary culture without the cholera and bad teeth. It’s a good time to be writing and a very good time to be reading.
