A couple more thoughts on blogging from this newbie.
On the one hand, it’s completely insane. The internet is a free printing press, and so you have a zillion people setting up their printing presses in the street and covering the town with paper. How are any of us readers going to sort it out? As a reader and writer, I feel overwhelmed by the internet. My computer is sitting their waiting like a landfill: I wade through spam and beautiful emails from old friends. It’s too stimulating. I already don’t know how to set borders in my life. And now that I’m blogging, it sort of owns me. When I sit down, it says, What do you have to throw in the landfill?
Of course the exciting thing is, We all get to watch how this sorts itself out. We’re going to be alive, maybe, knock wood, as the great informative institutions of the net form. The New York Public Libraries, the British Museums, the Random Houses and CBS’s of the internet—we’re going to watch those volcanoes rise from the sea. And maybe they won’t be institutions, but constellations of institutions.
On the humility front: you get comment on something you’ve said, and it’s stunning. You realize: the internet is here because we’re all smarter. That education in the last century paid off. We can all play as citizens here, and we better!
I’ll stop before I get too sappy.