Blogging in the Early Republic

If you're interested in the ongoing debate about the legitimacy of blogging (see here for one of the most recent forays), this Common Place essay is interesting. The author, a graduate student in history at Johns Hopkins, makes a compelling argument for blogging as merely the latest branch on an old, old tree:

In Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (1845), one of his published writings in which diary entries were frequently excerpted, Wright confessed that "writing a journal does me good. I can let off my indignation at the wrongs I see and hear. I am far happier when I write a little every day. I take more note too, of passing events, and see more of what is going on around me. I live less in the past and future, and more in the present, when I journalize . . . It saves me from many dark hours to write down what I see and hear and feel daily. My soul would turn in upon and consume itself, if I did not thus let it out into my journal."

Wright died in 1870, already a relatively forgotten reformer. Yet - and I speak from my own experience in 2005 - his reflections on writing are eerily evocative of what it is like to blog. Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger?his eccentric range of interests, his resolution "to write down what I see and hear and feel daily," his use of journals to "let off" rants of "indignation," his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the "greater part of the day writing in his room." Was Wright a blogger? Are not his journals the fossilized originals of a species?

For those of us who consider blogging a worthwhile intellectual pursuit, as well as a personal and political one, it's a compelling argument. As the kids say, read the whole thing.