Blogging

If Henry David Thoreau were around today, do you think he would blog?

I began thinking about this after reading an interview with Greg Perry, editor of The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. The article leaves that impression that there's a kind of natural correspondence between the Journals and the blog format:

Thoreau’s journal seems particularly well-suited to the blogging format. What similarities and differences do you see between his 19th-century paper journal and our 21st-century electronic blogs?

The similarities are obvious. Daily entries. Personal notes. Natural observations. Runs the gamut really. I don’t think there are any differences except the obvious one. Thoreau wrote his journal as if others would read it eventually. So other than the immediacy of a blog, there isn’t that much different.

One of the joys of reading The Blog of Henry David Thoreau is realizing that some things haven’t changed since his time. What continuities do you see between his era and ours?

Actually, that’s the thing. Most things are the same. He is living in a technological age as well as we are. The railroad and the telegraph are changing the world he knows. The country that he lives in has changed from the primeval days of his ancestors. There is a buried past there as well. And people are people. Politicians are especially politicians. Commerce is commerce. Even farmers are joining that business.

But I wanted to get a few other thoughts on the subject, so I posed the question to a few of my friends who have spent time with Thoreau. Their initial responses are below.

George:

Great question, Tim!

I think he'd blog, but I think he'd equivocate about why he was doing it.
Much like his famous ambivalence with the train that abutted Walden Pond (he
admired the energy of the industry as human accomplishment, but resented the
intrusion on nature and philosophic solitude for the mere sake of
connectedness), I think he'd find the Web a vexing friend.

And I don't think he'd give up journaling, at all--he might publish his
journals on his blog, in fact, in addition to whatever timely entries he was
making there.

And, of course, he'd be doing all of this on a borrowed computer, using a
DSL connection paid for by his parents.

Matt:

What's a blog?

Ha ha. I'm not that ignorant.

He would not. His journals were reservoirs of material for his polished, longer work. I don't think he'd have made his writing process public. Of course, the blog form could have changed his composition process--maybe he'd still keep a journal, and write "publically" in a blog more often. But I think his informal writing/journaling was important as a place of refuge.

I also think he was fairly class-conscious--a naysayer, and one who loved to tweak the establishment, but I think he liked to do so from within, rather than from without. I would guess that a part of him would see blogging as too democratic: that is, unreferreed, lacking true craft. Of course, there's some good writing online, but he was anal about drafting and language.

Jonathan:

Hmmm, would Thoreau blog. An interesting question.

We know that Thoreau was involved with The Dial for some time, and did publish there, so maybe today he would be a contributor to something like n+1.

But what makes me doubtful that Thoreau would be a blogger is precisely the 'timeliness' of blogging - the genre of rushed thoughts rapidly written down before their shelf life expires is something that would not appeal to him (cf. "Reading").

And yet, Thoreau did give talks at the Lyseum, "A Plea for John Brown," etc., and so perhaps today he would find The Blog to be the successor of the public talk / lecture. I'm not sure.

But if the specific question is: would Thoreau have blogged rather than kept his journal, or would he do his journaling on a blog, I think the answer is no. The journal was a writer's journal (as you know, most of Walden comes out of it), not something that existed for the sake of public perusal. Near the end of his life, however, he was going back to revise portions of the journal, seemingly deciding that they would be worth preserving.

So, in sum, I don't know. But I'd be interested to hear what others have thought.

Their responses offer a more nuanced take on what Thoreau's attitude toward blogging might be.
Anyone else want to weigh in with opinions?

Yesterday Numenius gave me the heads up the Lisa Williams went live with her directory of place blogs at placeblogger.com. Congratulations, Lisa!

It's quite an accomplishment to pull something like this together, an effort I appreciate because I attempted something similar earlier this summer and gave up once I remembered that I hadn't finished my dissertation (funny how that slips my mind sometimes). What I find interesting is that Lisa and I were developing place blogging directories using Drupal at the same time while living a few miles apart in the Boston area but without having met each other. By July I had developed and abandoned my revised Ecotone site at placeblogging.com and by early August Lisa had bet a colleague that she could collect 1000 place blogs from around the country. I don't know if she's reached the 1000 mark yet or not, but she must be close, and placeblogger.com promises to be a useful showcase for this genre of blogging.

Lisa's definition of place blogs is a useful one:

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place

Lisa has spoken a couple of times at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and you can listen to her discuss the project by visiting the Berkman archives.

This morning I ordered a copy of Fred's new book A Slow Road Home, a project that grew out of his blog entries over the last few years. I've been following Fred's blog for the last two years as part of them dissertation research and have chatted with him several times about his writing, so it's great to see him reach this latest milestone. I not only look forward to reading his book but also to continuing to follow his  blogging in Fragments of Floyd. 

Congratulations, Fred! 

My twin distractions this afternoon have been Friendster and Thingster, two different kinds of social networking applications that I hadn’t tried before.

Andrew invited me to join Friendster and once I signed up, I wasted part of the afternoon figuring out how it worked and browsing through the gallery. It definitely weaves a sticky network; once I started exploring, I found it hard to stop.