On Blogging

I just saw  this  comment  on Facebook: “Nobody writes  any more.  They just blog.”  There was a bit more stuff around it, the boilerplate blather about these  darned  kids these days and their darned lolspeak, literacy is doomed and so forth, but that line jumped out at me.
Nobody writes any more.  They just blog.  It’s something Yogi Berra  might have said.  Of course blogging is writing.  It is words (although I’ve seen some blogs that were mostly pictures) intended to convey information. (although I’ve seen some blogs which were trying to just be  funny, or artistic, or to peddle a product, so sometimes it’s only information if the definition of information is ‘anything that’s in a blog)

But, you can’t say blogging is a bad thing just because there are a lot of crappy blogs outs there.  Blogging’s a great thing.  I’ve been doing it for many years now and, although few people (probably  nobody) will ever read all  of it, the grand total still amounts to an amazing number of words.  If they were all collected together, it would be longer than Lord of  the Rings or The Bible.
One depressing thing about it is that when I started blogging, I considered  it a writing  exercise and thought that my  writing would  improve from the experience.  However, as I read  back  through  them (I occasionally take a glance  back), it is clear to me how consistent the writing is.  Seldom is there  a  shining pearl of a blog which makes all the others like like ordinary, everyday, unmagical words, but neither do I find any so bad that  I  think ‘what the hell  was I thinking that day?’

But, my point is, blogging is writing.  It’s not as if I’ve been doing anything  else all this time.