Blogging -- if you will forgive the cartoon philosophising -- brought the European Enlightenment to the US. Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise.
Which is great.
But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet.
...
If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.
"Oh, the boredom of argument without action, politics without power."
...
Blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts -- a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.
