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.
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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."
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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.
Needless bureaucracy led to the founding of William Dockwra's Penny Post in 1680. A merchant of London, Dockwra realized the potential for a business designed to quickly and cheaply deliver mail from one place in London to another, all for the cost of a penny. Along with his business partner, Robert Murray, he quickly founded his business and based their head office in Line Street, along with seven additional sorting offices. The Penny Post met with tremendous success, and grew to five hundred receiving houses in just two years. Messengers would deliver to each area between 5 and 15 times daily. It was a well-run system that received much acclaim.
