Scott Simon on the NPR Weekend Edition program used his editorial time to talk about blogs. He started with “Blogs… blah. Two days don’t go by that a friend doesn’t send me a link to a blog” and ended with “Plato taught us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Blogs remind us that the over-examined life is not worth reading.”
Theodore Sturgeon summed it up years ago in Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” Most AOL Home pages are banal. So is most literature. Recently, in a bookstore, I was astounded to scan two bookshelves full of audio tapes to discover there was little I really wanted to read.
But consider it from a different angle. Few of us sit down and take the time to write a letter, longhand, in pen and ink and post it via mail to our close correspondents. Blogging is the new letter writing, the new journalling, the new diaries. And, yes, 90% of them are crud, but 10% are not. And while much of what we have to say is pretty dull, there are the jewels to find, if not the comfort in reading that the lives of others are not that much different from our own.