The irksome positoid bottom with the atrocious mid-Atlantic “macho” accent writes:
This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing
False. A lie, even. How this got through the Atlantic’s verificationists, whom I’ve had to deal with for hours myself, eludes me.
[T]he historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter…. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be – but usually posthumously
Funny, I wrote something similar in Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog”: “Even handwritten diaries will be discovered posthumously, as every diarist knows deep down.” I assume the attribution was left out by accident.
Blogging – even to an audience of a few hundred in the early days – was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a narcotic.
Or smearing testosterone on your chest.
When readers of my blog bump into me in person, they invariably address me as Andrew. Print readers don’t do that. It’s Mr. Sullivan to them.
And when members of barebacking sites bump into him, it’s RawMuslGlutes all the way. (Read Andrew Sullivan’s Friendster profile, if you wish.)
As the blogosphere has expanded beyond anyone’s capacity to absorb it, I’ve needed an assistant and interns to scour the Web for links and stories and photographs to respond to and think about.
I manage pretty well with 1,560 RSS feeds. Man up, for Chrissakes.
Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch.
Yeah, I just wrote about that.
Who the fuck appointed this creature Queen of the Blogosphere? March 2009 can’t come fast enough.