For the November Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan writes a lengthy article — “Why I Blog” — musing on the nature of blogs. Most of what he says is well phrased and crafted and shows a prolonged thoughtfulness about the function and nature of blogs, although much of it, upon further analysis, seems rather familiar. But at least to blog detractors, this functions as a introduction to the blog format as a legitimate medium, and for the ignorant, shows how blogs contribute to the journalistic conversation.
Some of his definitions of the essence of a blog seemed to be rather restricting. On one level, it reminded me of how people tried to define the novel, and most everyone except Bakhtin failed to carve out a large enough space, because the novel is such a malleable and shape-shifting form. And that’s after hundreds of years of the novel’s existence. So granted, it’s very difficult to have a bird’s eye view and definition so early into a medium’s creation — we’re what, seven years in to blogging? — and it seems quite likely that as blogging evolves it will quite easily break whatever boundaries have been erected by the too-eager definers and categorizers. But Sullivan manages to capture the functioning of many blogs, at least, in this present moment.
But I’m afraid I’ve given too many comments about the dangers of the article and not enough of Sullivan. So here are some choice excerpts:
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.
As soon as I began writing this way, I realized that the online form rewarded a colloquial, unfinished tone. In one of my early Kindsley-guided experiments, he urged me not to think too hard before writing. […] But blogging requires an embrace of hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap.
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.
A writer full 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.
People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.
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.
