Blog on blogging

You may be surprised to hear that this lowly intern has his own office at his morning job. I am compelled to tell you that it is far away from everybody else’s office, is unbearably hot, is home to a fax machine from the 80’s (that is still used by employees), and it used to be a dorm room, which doesn’t explain why the wood floor smells like urine because I thought most people were done wetting themselves by college. Maybe that was a bit presumptuous of me, but seriously, who wets the floor in college?

Anyway, I am far away from everyone else in the office and I get lonely sometimes. I need to walk up to the other offices every once in a while to feel like I am part of the company. On one of my trips today there was a discussion about blogs. Two of us in the conversation had our own blogs. The third didn’t, but he brought up a valid concern about blogging. He asked if it was going to make getting published harder. I brushed it off and said, “No, I don’t think so.”

On the way home I got to thinking about this a lot more and remembered a conversation that I had with Boeke. We were talking about a blog that the two of us had come across. The author of the blog couldn’t spell, compose coherent sentences or write. Essentially, we were awestruck by the illiterate meanderings of the author. Boeke said he read that there are more writers now than there are readers. Excellent.

My co-worker’s comment today reignited some feeling about the issue of blogging, its relative ease and grand scale. While I am extremely grateful to have a place to publish my work, I worry that the invention of the blog might be taking some of us a few steps backward in literacy, writing ability and reading comprehension.

More on this later.