'Private Journals with Megaphones'

Blogs are merely "private journals with megaphones", wrote Russell Jacoby, a history prof at UCLA. Neat definition, isn't it?

He argued in today's Higher Education section of The Australian newspaper that in general blogs are pathetic when it comes to "reasoned contributions to public life." Certainly there is a grain of truth there. One can read lots of useless blogs, become a junkie at that, and, to use Portman's phrase, amuse him/herself to intellectual death. A word of caution there for both blog readers and writers (me included).

Here is another interesting quote from Jacoby:

Jose Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the revolt of the masses needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers? A New Yorker cartoon reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with book lovers lined up to get the author's autograph. The cartoon shows a table and a queue, but authors line up to see the reader, who sits behind the table. On the internet, articles, blog posts and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is archived, has anyone looked at last year's blogs?

The full-text article is here.