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Why blogs ain't nothing new

USA Today offers some nice historical perspective on blogging, pointing out that blogs are only the latest example of "an emerging technology (that) makes it possible for individuals outside the mainstream media to reach an audience.

Thomas Paine was basically a blogger -- in 1776.
Martin Luther's version of blogs totally ticked off the Holy Roman Emperor, who issued the Edict of Worms banning Luther's writings.

George Orwell was a blogger. So was Brian Lamb, the guy who started C-Span.....

Take Luther in the early 1500s. About 60 years before, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Before that, only the church and governments could afford to reproduce and manage information, keeping a lock on ideas and power. The printing press gave Luther a way to distribute his thesis � an early version of blogging. Next thing, we had Protestants.

In Paine's time, the key was the falling cost of printing pamphlets. That allowed Paine to get out his ideas in Common Sense, which greatly influenced the American Revolution. Pamphleteering was quite the bloglike craze in the 1700s, though most amateur writers stuck to politics and religion. The colonists didn't get anything like one current blog, called, �Adventures of a Domestic Engineer: The day-to-day travails of a sleep-deprived mother of three.�

Orwell wrote pamphlets before writing 1984. Lamb was maybe the first video blogger, or vlogger. In the 1970s, when ABC, NBC and CBS reigned supreme, cable opened TV to low-budget operations. Lamb worked in the Pentagon's public relations department before launching C-Span in 1979. He was a nobody who took a small bite out of major media's influence.....

Now the interesting question is: Who among bloggers is another Thomas Paine?

Discussion

2 comments about 'Why blogs ain't nothing new'

The blogs are just the underground press of the sixties, done without paper, under circumstances of greater cultural repression. Many of the same people, in fact . . .
@T / http://DeepEndNews.com

Posted by anna taylor at January 28, 2005 1:47 PM

Nice try, but you're not fooling me, Jon.
To liken blogging to essay writing, when much of the blogosphere has no standards for the drivel it produces, does a disservice to a form of writing that was made famous in the Western tradition hundreds of years ago by Montaigne.
The problem with too many bloggers is that they refuse to do much, if any, research. And they also think that they have a God-given right to trash and misrepresent anyone who they disagree with. They also sometimes fail to remind readers of conflicts of interest--such as when a blogger, who makes his living as a newspaper columnist, trashes another newspaper columnist in the same market without mentioning that he's intentionally taking aim at the competition.

Posted by Jonathan Barnes at January 28, 2005 2:03 PM

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Chill, blogophiles; you're not the first to do what you're doing
Trackback excerpt: I love that headline, which I lifted from USA Today's Tuesday article on blogs. If nothing else, for the use of [Read More]

Posted on Desirable Roasted Coffee at January 26, 2005 11:30 PM

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