GroshLink

Blogging in the Early Republic is a fascinating piece from Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, tracing the origins of blogging to antebellum America's reading and journal-keeping (and/or scrapbooking) habits. I must confess that I've had such tendencies since youth, even a phase of scrapbooking on my bedroom wall!

One friend wondered how I had the time to post on this blog and who in the world reads them (besides the one making the comment). Not much disimiliar to the critique mentioned in the linked piece regarding a pamphleteer, I suppose he thinks he is shaking the world, but I can perceive very little of the motion so far. But I find this a place to reflect, gather my thoughts, and share them. Some receive a direct response, others just inform, still others lead into continuing conversations carried out face-to-face, and others just have a life on-line.

Indeed, blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading, an insight as obvious to Tocqueville as it should be to most bloggers today. The insight is that readers, in a culture of abundant reading material, regularly seek out other readers, either by becoming writers themselves or by sharing their records of reading with others. That process, of course, requires cultural conditions that value democratic rather than deferential ideals of authority. But to explain how new habits of reading and writing develop, those cultural conditions matter as much -- perhaps more -- than economic or technological innovations. As Tocqueville knew, the explosion of newspapers in America was not just a result of their cheapness or their means of production, any more than the explosion of blogging is just a result of the fact that free and user-friendly software like Blogger is available. Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person's new outlet for an old need. In Wright's words, it is the need "to see more of what is going on around me." And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.