Why I Blog
For centuries, writers
have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought,
the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time.
But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and
quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express
themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its
truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the
interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented,
visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden
era for journalism.
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| (Photo credit: Trey Ratcliffe) | | | | |
The word blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log.
It contains in its four letters a concise and accurate
self-description: it is a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on
the World Wide Web. In the monosyllabic vernacular of the Internet, Web log soon became the word blog.
Also see:
Video: "Your Brain on Blog"
Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder discuss the narcotic appeal of blogging and the occupational hazards of thinking quickly.
This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible
by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows
for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small
glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy
review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent
beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in
immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked
via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources.
Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely
porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for
the act of writing are still sinking in.
A
ship’s log owes its name to a small wooden board, often weighted with
lead, that was for centuries attached to a line and thrown over the
stern. The weight of the log would keep it in the same place in the
water, like a provisional anchor, while the ship moved away. By
measuring the length of line used up in a set period of time, mariners
could calculate the speed of their journey (the rope itself was marked
by equidistant “knots” for easy measurement). As a ship’s voyage
progressed, the course came to be marked down in a book that was called a
log.
In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or
satellites or sonar, these logs were an indispensable source for
recording what actually happened. They helped navigators surmise where
they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to
stay at sea. They provided accountability to a ship’s owners and
traders. They were designed to be as immune to faking as possible. Away
from land, there was usually no reliable corroboration of events apart
from the crew’s own account in the middle of an expanse of blue and gray
and green; and in long journeys, memories always blur and facts
disperse. A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in
real time.
As you read a log, you have the curious sense of
moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a
book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one,
it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human
self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which
human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as
they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because
they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as
well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer
did.
Anyone
who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this
world. We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to
wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog
now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge. This is partly true for all
journalism, which is, as its etymology suggests, daily writing, always
subject to subsequent revision. And a good columnist will adjust
position and judgment and even political loyalty over time, depending on
events. But a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And
with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even
more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that
much greater.
No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his
minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly
as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less
noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a
day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A
novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world.
For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to
writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more
accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing
out loud.
You end up writing about yourself, since you are a
relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and
facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form
closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is
almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to
marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a
terrestrial log. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of
course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a
way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering.
But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most
personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and
immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and
exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.
I
remember first grappling with what to put on my blog. It was the spring
of 2000 and, like many a freelance writer at the time, I had some vague
notion that I needed to have a presence “online.” I had no clear idea
of what to do, but a friend who ran a Web-design company offered to
create a site for me, and, since I was technologically clueless, he also
agreed to post various essays and columns as I wrote them. Before too
long, this became a chore for him, and he called me one day to say he’d
found an online platform that was so simple I could henceforth post all
my writing myself. The platform was called Blogger.
As
I used it to post columns or links to books or old essays, it occurred
to me that I could also post new writing—writing that could even be
exclusive to the blog. But what? Like any new form, blogging did not
start from nothing. It evolved from various journalistic traditions. In
my case, I drew on my mainstream-media experience to navigate the virgin
sea. I had a few early inspirations: the old Notebook section of The New Republic,
a magazine that, under the editorial guidance of Michael Kinsley, had
introduced a more English style of crisp, short commentary into what had
been a more high-minded genre of American opinion writing. The New Republic
had also pioneered a Diarist feature on the last page, which was
designed to be a more personal, essayistic, first-person form of
journalism. Mixing the two genres, I did what I had been trained to
do—and improvised.
I’d previously written online as well,
contributing to a listserv for gay writers and helping Kinsley initiate a
more discursive form of online writing for Slate, the first
magazine published exclusively on the Web. As soon as I began writing
this way, I realized that the online form rewarded a colloquial,
unfinished tone. In one of my early Kinsley-guided experiments, he
urged me not to think too hard before writing. So I wrote as I’d write
an e-mail—with only a mite more circumspection. This is hazardous, of
course, as anyone who has ever clicked Send in a fit of anger or hurt
will testify. But blogging requires an embrace of such hazards, a
willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap.
From
the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple
experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers
was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation
of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the
alternative meant. I’d edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic,
for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety
of traditional outlets. And in all this, I’d often chafed, as most
writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics, editorial
fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree publishing
entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in the early
days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a narcotic.
It
was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer
since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and
reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid
some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s
incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of
fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once
had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to
proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried
in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all
these troubles evaporated.
Alas,
as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately
replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting
something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed
to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor,
more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable
than any colleague.
Again, it’s hard to overrate how different
this is. Writers can be sensitive, vain souls, requiring gentle
nurturing from editors, and oddly susceptible to the blows delivered by
reviewers. They survive, for the most part, but the thinness of their
skins is legendary. Moreover, before the blogosphere, reporters and
columnists were largely shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes,
letters to the editor would arrive in due course and subscriptions would
be canceled. But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a
relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For
a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause,
muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from
pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the
feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.
And so blogging found
its own answer to the defensive counterblast from the journalistic
establishment. To the charges of inaccuracy and unprofessionalism,
bloggers could point to the fierce, immediate scrutiny of their readers.
Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box
of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the
walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the
original screwup. The form was more accountable, not less, because
there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly
humiliated for sloppiness. Of course, a blogger could ignore an error or
simply refuse to acknowledge mistakes. But if he persisted, he would be
razzed by competitors and assailed by commenters and abandoned by
readers. In an era when the traditional media found itself beset by
scandals as disparate as Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Dan Rather,
bloggers survived the first assault on their worth. In time, in fact,
the high standards expected of well-trafficked bloggers spilled over
into greater accountability, transparency, and punctiliousness among the
media powers that were. Even New York Times columnists were forced to admit when they had been wrong.
The blog remained a superficial
medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards
brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise
online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as
thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more.
And, as
Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the
key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a
publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it
sinks.
But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater
depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The
reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink. An
old-school columnist can write 800 brilliant words analyzing or
commenting on, say, a new think-tank report or scientific survey. But in
reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of
the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can
always be misleading out of context). Online, a hyperlink to the
original source transforms the experience. Yes, a few sentences of
bloggy spin may not be as satisfying as a full column, but the ability
to read the primary material instantly—in as careful or shallow a
fashion as you choose—can add much greater context than anything on
paper. Even a blogger’s chosen pull quote, unlike a columnist’s, can be
effortlessly checked against the original. Now this innovation,
pre-dating blogs but popularized by them, is increasingly central to
mainstream journalism.
A
blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage
in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to
exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The
blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of
authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other
nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and
the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation,
rather than a production.
A
writer fully aware of and at ease with the provisionality of his own
work is nothing new. For centuries, writers have experimented with forms
that suggest the imperfection of human thought, the inconstancy of
human affairs, and the humbling, chastening passage of time. If you
compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with
the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference
between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that
seeks to bring some finality to the argument. Perhaps the greatest
single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a
series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments,
observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so
compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.
Or take the brilliant polemics of Karl Kraus, the publisher of and main writer for Die Fackel,
who delighted in constantly twitting authority with slashing aphorisms
and rapid-fire bursts of invective. Kraus had something rare in his day:
the financial wherewithal to self-publish. It gave him a fearlessness
that is now available to anyone who can afford a computer and an
Internet connection.
But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre
was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each
one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic,
Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition,
making them three-dimensional through time. In the best modern
translations, each essay is annotated, sentence by sentence, paragraph
by paragraph, by small letters (A, B, and C) for each major edition,
helping the reader see how each rewrite added to or subverted,
emphasized or ironized, the version before.
Montaigne was living his
skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind,
learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far
from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of
unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the
pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good
measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would
call external links. His own thoughts are strewn with and complicated by
the aphorisms and anecdotes of others. Scholars of the sources note
that many of these “money quotes” were deliberately taken out of
context, adding layers of irony to writing that was already saturated in
empirical doubt.
To blog is therefore to let go of your writing
in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to
float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did,
pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost
immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more
about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories,
and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes
outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and
complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against
this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a
dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even
passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want
to participate.
That
atmosphere will inevitably be formed by the blogger’s personality. The
blogosphere may, in fact, be the least veiled of any forum in which a
writer dares to express himself. Even the most careful and self-aware
blogger will reveal more about himself than he wants to in a few
unguarded sentences and publish them before he has the sense to hit
Delete. The wise panic that can paralyze a writer—the fear that he will
be exposed, undone, humiliated—is not available to a blogger. You can’t
have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your
emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can
try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands,
but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is
rich in personality.
The faux intimacy of the Web experience, the
closeness of the e-mail and the instant message, seeps through. You feel
as if you know bloggers as they go through their lives, experience the
same things you are experiencing, and share the moment. When readers of
my blog bump into me in person, they invariably address me as Andrew.
Print readers don’t do that. It’s Mr. Sullivan to them.
On my
blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can
look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I
responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night. There is
a vividness to this immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print. The same
goes for the 2000 recount, the Iraq War, the revelations of Abu Ghraib,
the death of John Paul II, or any of the other history-making events of
the past decade. There is simply no way to write about them in real
time without revealing a huge amount about yourself. And the intimate
bond this creates with readers is unlike the bond that the The Times,
say, develops with its readers through the same events. Alone in front
of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader.
The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger
has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the
humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but
always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader
not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term
that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.
These
friends, moreover, are an integral part of the blog itself—sources of
solace, company, provocation, hurt, and correction. If I were to do an
inventory of the material that appears on my blog, I’d estimate that a
good third of it is reader-generated, and a good third of my time is
spent absorbing readers’ views, comments, and tips. Readers tell me of
breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing
assumptions. And this is what blogging, in turn, does to reporting. The
traditional method involves a journalist searching for key sources,
nurturing them, and sequestering them from his rivals. A blogger
splashes gamely into a subject and dares the sources to come to him.
Some
of this material—e-mails from soldiers on the front lines, from
scientists explaining new research, from dissident Washington writers
too scared to say what they think in their own partisan redoubts—might
never have seen the light of day before the blogosphere. And some of it,
of course, is dubious stuff. Bloggers can be spun and misled as easily
as traditional writers—and the rigorous source assessment that good
reporters do can’t be done by e-mail. But you’d be surprised by what
comes unsolicited into the in-box, and how helpful it often is.
Not
all of it is mere information. Much of it is also opinion and
scholarship, a knowledge base that exceeds the research department of
any newspaper. A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.
Indeed, the
most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working
in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real
literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now.
There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of
e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony
on an unmediated comments section. But the truth is out there—and the
miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you.
Fellow
bloggers are always expanding this knowledge base. Eight years ago, the
blogosphere felt like a handful of individual cranks fighting with one
another. Today, it feels like a universe of cranks, with vast, pulsating
readerships, fighting with one another. To the neophyte reader, or
blogger, it can seem overwhelming. But there is a connection between the
intimacy of the early years and the industry it has become today. And
the connection is human individuality.
The pioneers of online journalism—Slate
and Salon—are still very popular, and successful. But the more
memorable stars of the Internet—even within those two sites—are all
personally branded. Daily Kos, for example, is written by hundreds of
bloggers, and amended by thousands of commenters. But it is named after
Markos Moulitsas, who started it, and his own prose still provides a
backbone to the front-page blog. The biggest news-aggregator site in the
world, the Drudge Report, is named after its founder, Matt Drudge, who
somehow conveys a unified sensibility through his selection of links,
images, and stories. The vast, expanding universe of The Huffington Post
still finds some semblance of coherence in the Cambridge-Greek twang of
Arianna; the entire world of online celebrity gossip circles the drain
of Perez Hilton; and the investigative journalism, reviewing, and
commentary of Talking Points Memo is still tied together by the tone of
Josh Marshall. Even Slate is unimaginable without Mickey Kaus’s voice.
What endures is a human brand. Readers have encountered this phenomenon before—I.F. Stone’s Weekly
comes to mind—but not to this extent. It stems, I think, from the
conversational style that blogging rewards. What you want in a
conversationalist is as much character as authority. And if you think of
blogging as more like talk radio or cable news than opinion magazines
or daily newspapers, then this personalized emphasis is less surprising.
People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging,
they have a sensibility.
But writing in this new form is a
collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one—and the
connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the
blogs. The links not only drive conversation, they drive readers. The
more you link, the more others will link to you, and the more traffic
and readers you will get. The zero-sum game of old media—in which Time benefits from Newsweek’s decline and vice versa—becomes win-win. It’s great for Time to be linked to by Newsweek
and the other way round. One of the most prized statistics in the
blogosphere is therefore not the total number of readers or page views,
but the “authority” you get by being linked to by other blogs. It’s an
indication of how central you are to the online conversation of
humankind.
The reason this open-source market of thinking and
writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving
collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The
flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings. Reason is
not the only fuel in the tank. In a world where no distinction is made
between good traffic and bad traffic, and where emotion often rules,
some will always raise their voice to dominate the conversation; others
will pander shamelessly to their readers’ prejudices; others will start
online brawls for the fun of it. Sensationalism, dirt, and the ease of
formulaic talking points always beckon. You can disappear into the
partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with.
But
linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced
to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock. And it’s in the
interests of both camps to generate shared traffic. This encourages
polarized slugfests. But online, at least you see both sides. Reading The Nation or National Review
before the Internet existed allowed for more cocooning than the
wide-open online sluice gates do now. If there’s more incivility,
there’s also more fluidity. Rudeness, in any case, isn’t the worst thing
that can happen to a blogger. Being ignored is. Perhaps the nastiest
thing one can do to a fellow blogger is to rip him apart and fail to
provide a link.
A successful blog therefore has to balance
itself between a writer’s own take on the world and others. Some
bloggers collect, or “aggregate,” other bloggers’ posts with dozens of
quick links and minimalist opinion topspin: Glenn Reynolds at
Instapundit does this for the right-of-center; Duncan Black at Eschaton
does it for the left. Others are more eclectic, or aggregate links in a
particular niche, or cater to a settled and knowledgeable reader base. A
“blogroll” is an indicator of whom you respect enough to keep in your
galaxy. For many years, I kept my reading and linking habits to a
relatively small coterie of fellow political bloggers. In today’s
blogosphere, to do this is to embrace marginality. I’ve since added
links to religious blogs and literary ones and scientific ones and just
plain weird ones. As the blogosphere has expanded beyond anyone’s
capacity to absorb it, I’ve needed an assistant and interns to scour the
Web for links and stories and photographs to respond to and think
about. It’s a difficult balance, between your own interests and
obsessions, and the knowledge, insight, and wit of others—but an
immensely rich one. There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less
like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and
generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music.
He is both artist and producer—and the beat always goes on.
If
all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers
from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth
or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers
precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a
subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of
writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder.
Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more
than it does traditional long-form writing.
A blogger will air a
variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other
than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use
time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points
count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing
process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two.
The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more
enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging
should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is
pernicious. In some ways, blogging’s gifts to our discourse make the
skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The
torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater
premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it
into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.
The
points of this essay, for example, have appeared in shards and
fragments on my blog for years. But being forced to order them in my
head and think about them for a longer stretch has helped me understand
them better, and perhaps express them more clearly. Each week, after a
few hundred posts, I also write an actual newspaper column. It
invariably turns out to be more considered,
balanced, and evenhanded
than the blog. But the blog will always inform and enrich the column,
and often serve as a kind of free-form, free-associative research. And
an essay like this will spawn discussion best handled on a blog. The
conversation, in other words, is the point, and the different idioms
used by the conversationalists all contribute something of value to it.
And so, if the defenders of the old media once viscerally regarded
blogging as some kind of threat, they are starting to see it more as a
portal, and a spur.
There is, after all, something simply
irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a
chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered
our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t
replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz
merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as
blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and
blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also
inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.
The
reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is
that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be
engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would
listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk,
or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a
demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to
opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper
evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the
medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for
the other.
In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper
and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The
blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has
introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled
writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And
yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in
the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.
Words, of all sorts, have never seemed so now.
Source:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/why-i-blog/307060/
