Nick Carr is rapidly becoming one of my favorite bloggers. Not so much because I agree with his points, but because his style is sharp and brilliant and because he recognizes that many of the elitist current distinctions in the writing community are, in a word, nonsense.
This Gaurdian article contains the very clever notion that blogging’s virtue is what others have called a blogging vice – the tendency to regurgitate articles and news gleaned from major outlets, adding personal notes or spin in the process. Carr notes that this is a *good* thing as it processes information in ways he likens to a digestive tract. Unflattering as it may seem to the times when bloggers are actually out in the world researching elusive and exclusive topics and writing about them, much of blogging is just this sort of “reprocessing” of information as it flows through our vast networked media extravaganza. Re-examination can be as helpful as examination, and I can’t help but think that blogging is making the pie much bigger in the sense that more people are paying more attention to more information. As long as we brew more coffee to keep everybody awake to read all this, it will all work just fine.
Joe Duck 