Blogs are Only a Fad :: Internet Online Communication Essays

Blogs are Only a Fad With the beginning of the 21st century well under way, we find ourselves in the midst of a digital revolution. New technology seems to be springing up every other day, and old ones are continuously being replaced by improved versions of their precursors, if not being replaced by something entirely new. The internet is probably one of the most influential inventions of our time, bringing about a whole slew of other technologies into our lives. One particular technology of interest is the weblog, more often referred to as "blog". Blogs are essentially online journals where one can write and post their thoughts, which then become available for be read by anyone with access to the internet. Blog software such as Movable Type allows one to easily publish their entries online with a few clicks of the mouse. The convenience and accessibility of using blogs are what have made them so popular, especially among the younger generation. Despite their advantages, however, blogs are simply a fad, and will make no significant impact on our society or the way we write, because ultimately, we desire more permanence in our writing than a mere sequence of binary codes. The primitive cavemen of the prehistoric era, the Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent and Shakespeare all have something in common - typography. The cavemen etched crude drawings on walls, the Sumerians pressed pictographic marks into clay tablets using a stylus, and Shakespeare wrote poetry using a quill pen and ink. Though their writings vary greatly in elegance or sophistication, each of them left their marks so that their history and contributions may forever be preserved. As William J. Mitchell points out in his essay, "In the thousands of years since, humankind has figured out innumerable ways to bind words permanently to matter...to carve them into clay and stone, to print them on paper, to form them out of unlikely things like neon tubes, and furtively to spray them onto walls" (Mitchell 2003). The fact that mankind has been practicing the act of writing for eons is proof that we, as human beings, desire to leave writing as records so that future generations may read them a nd know of our actions and thoughts. If we did not feel the need to preserve our knowledge permanently, it would be passed down orally, and we would not care to preserve what little writing that would be done out of necessity.