I’m winding up a 13-day trip for my PhD program, during which I wanted to make blog entries every day, but I always had more pressing obligations. On my drive from VA to NH, I listened to an audiobook by Hugh Hewitt on blogging. I think that blogging about the book represents an interesting convergence of current forms of communication.
The book wasn’t really what I was expecting — I guess I thought it would be more of a “how-to.” It’s a kind of a smug argument for why blogs are THE communication form, using four examples in which bloggers called so much attention to stories not getting appropriate attention in the mainstream media that the stories eventually DID get attention in the MSM, as Hewitt calls it. I don’t deny that blogging is big and important at the moment, but who’s to say that some new kind of communication isn’t going to come along at any moment and supplant blogging? Hewitt also offers a rather belabored comparison between the Protestant Reformation (Gutenberg, movable type, etc.) and blogging. I was a bit predisposed not to like the book much because I don’t share Hewitt’s politics. There’s a review of the book on Instapundit for those interested.