Although in the first wave of people to use email, I have not blogged before now. I find that fact interesting. But will anyone else? And there surely, is part of the reason for the delay.. Why presume what I have to write is of interest to anyone? Except, perhaps, to me. If I want to monologue about those things which happen to interest me why dont I just do it quietly. Either by muttering to myself in the bath or if I must, keep a written journal. Why post it up here for anyone to read? But then perhaps no one will read it anyway; in which case it is no more self indulgent than a journal. Except that when what I write falls "stillborn from the internet" a certain humility born of a certain humiliation may be induced. After all there is just so MUCH stuff out there. But actually this is not a new problem. We already had it with books. Could someone have read all the books in the Library of Alexandria? There were between 400,000 and 700,000 volumes. (According to Wikipedia, so it must be true.) So thats a "no" then. And all of them hand-written. There can be no doubt that being a classicist would be a lot more challenging if the library had not been burnt.... And then Gutenberg comes along. And what opened? The floodgates.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_Revolution So the printing revolution, which has of course not stopped. (Cheaper printing, printing on demand) initiated the overload of print. And all on dead trees. I realised the connection between the book supply problem, and the blogosphere when I came across Gabriel Zaid's ( commendably short ) book "So many books". One of his arresting statistics is that a new book is now published every thirty seconds. Human beings are publishing vastly more than they could read. Given so many books, and the impossibility of any individual reading them all, he discusses the problem of how the right reader is to find the right book. The analogy with the problem of finding the right blog is obvious. However with blogs we do have search engines to help us. I found Zaid's book by the process of seeing it on a table in Hornsey Library, Crouch End - ( there are some reviews on Librarything - here they are http://www.librarything.com/work/9556/reviews) - Somehow one does not encounter blogs with the same degree of serendipity. There is something about the experience browsing along a shelf which so far, search engines cannot match. But I digress.
There is no doubt what ever that the way in which that cluster of technologies we now all call the "Internet" has reduced the cost of worldwide publication essentially to zero is a revolution. We are all living through it; we know we are in it, but actually we are quite clueless as to where we are going to end up. There is almost an element of forced "democratic equality" caused by this as even the most expert pundits display expertise by declaring their lack of certainty. They have as their precedent that distruster of the written word, Socrates. Who was the wisest of men, because he knew that he knew nothing. We know this because although he thought books a really bad thing, basing the whole of the "Socratic Method" on living dialogue between the actively engaged, it was WRITTEN down, in a book, by his follower Plato. Distrusting writing as being bad for the memory, and producing books which unlike the author when present could not be argued with, we cannot doubt that printing, the third great information technology, would have appalled him. But would the fourth? For one of the things you can do with the internet is enter into dialogue. Whereas before a dialogue required that you meet someone, with the internet discussion can happen, without people having to be in the same place; nor do they have to be connected at the same time. (Before getting too carried away with the novelty of this we should note that even in that so distant, and recent, period of paper snail-mail correspondence clubs existed. When learned academies elected foreigners to correspondence membership it was not a figure of speech. But paper post was much slower and much more expensive. )
To begin with printed books based themselves as to design -" look and feel" - on the hand copied volumes that had been traded for centuries. Soon the possibility of producing multiple copies so quickly, and, the longer the print run, at a lower marginal price, changed the way books could be used. And what they could do. Those who wish to stress the power of technology and the way it seems to cause things to happen say that the invention of printing lay behind the reformation. Surely more subtle than that. But the reformation that happened used printing, and there can be no doubt that a reformation that used printing was different from one that did not. Printing, and the availability of books to read caused literacy to be of more use to the general mass, and so encouraged the spread of literacy. Books were not mass produced to fill a market need; it was being able to produce them that created the market.
In the same way internet technologies began with email. This just worked by analogy with ordinary mail - a message sent from someone to someone about something. To start with, apart from being typed, it was just like sending written notes. Only really fast. The first time I encountered email was on a VAX 11/780 computer in a college in Dublin. About 1979, so before the Internet. You could only use VAXmail to communicate with other people holding accounts on the same computer, which we got at by using time sharing terminals. The ability to swap messages back and forth so fast, in the knowledge that the other person would get your message both real soon, and at a time convenient for them made it hugely useful between admin offices. So much better than "telephone tennis" Then the students found out about it, and lacking the ( uninvented ) mobile phone, and generally having no phones of any kind in their flats/ bedsits /houses in multiple occupation/ squats, started using email to organise their social lives. When the manager of the computer facility saw the rise in message traffic, he shut down VAX mail. He was a computer scientist and knew what computers were really for. Doing really hard arithmetic, not messaging.
That kind of email was useful because fast. (And no mobile phones, and no txt messaging) By then, in Dublin, post took between one and two days to be delivered, with second day delivery the likely period . When my mother was a student in Dublin in the 1930's there were four collections and deliveries in the City a day. So one could send an invitation to someone for tea, on a post card, first thing in the morning and get their reply by lunchtime. In due course first the fax, and then email would occupy a niche vacated by snail-mail. But intriguingly (at least I find it intriguing ) BEFORE the technology to supersede fast paper mail had come into being, fast paper mail had died out. There were, of course, blokes on motorbikes, but that expensive.
Soon email lists started (and with them spam). The basic principle of using computer networks as a way of distributing text at very low cost had been established. All the developments since then - web pages and then blogging software are low cost ways of distributing print. They lower the barriers to entry to for anyone who wants to write anything. - "it used to be said that if a sufficiently large number of monkeys typed for long enough they would write the works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the internet we know this is not true" so wrote someone whose name escapes me - Blogging software "just" makes it easy to post stuff. (where computers are concerned never underestimate the value of "easy") The other essential development, the search engine as it is called in general and google as we all know it in particular enables us to find relevant text. After a fashion. The particular blogging software I am using now combines email and blogging in a way which really does seem to be so very simple. So maybe thats why I am blogging now. It just got irresistibly easy. Also, perhaps it is time. I will explain that in another post.
(By the way I would say that the first great information technology was the idea of recording information symbolically, the second was the use of an alphabet to represent speech, the third was printing using movable type, which is only practicable for alphabetic writing, and the fourth "the internet")