Blogging in 2206

Yesterday, Miss Snark quoted John Updike in an article saying this:

"You type in your blog, and some other people read it, and so you create a print society apart from real society and you're getting the gratification of expressing yourself . . . It's a way to develop a public persona, but it's very undiscriminating, and very 'me-minded.' We're all me-minded. We all have egos."

People are pissed that he's looking down his nose at bloggers, and I can see why. It's a ridiculous position. Who cares what other people are writing, anyway? You don't have to read any of it.

But I'm immersed in my work-in-progress right now, so the quote reminded me of something I read in my research the other day:

Regency ladies wrote an enormous number of letters to each other, their friends and their family. Many wrote to their favourite correspondents virtually every day, about love, politics, marriage, money, health and despair, anything and everything.

Two hundred years later, these letters, which the ladies themselves almost certainly saw as worthless, are our window into their society and their lives. We'd be lost without them. So, will historians be reading blogs in 2206, the way we're reading the letters of 1806? If so, yeah, they'll be sifting through a lot of crap. They'll also be reading some really, really good stuff, intelligent commentary, creative ideas, and lively communities.

Who knows, maybe some of us will go down in history as smart, and Updike will look like the ass.

Abby