Day 20 - "As if talking to people or getting their emails isn't boring enough..."

A few years ago this was put out as part of eXile's round-up of 2003:

7. Blogs
The Joke: As if talking to people or getting their emails isn't
boring enough...this is the year that Blogs went REALLY big. You can thank the Iraq War more than anything for that. If last year's blog-induced black comedy came from desperate-for-attention geeks, liberals and right-wing freaks pestering you to read the same crap that they do, this year's blogs were taken to a new level of humor...

This applies to a fair amount of what I've seen out there, but I keep running into thought provoking ones like Freakonomics and Syria Comment. As well there's Steven Johnson, who wrote Everything Bad is Good for You. Towards the end of that book Johnson appraises the relative merits of TV, print, email & blogs:

Now for the bad news... It is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in shorter bursts, following links across the web, or sifting through a dozen email messages. The breadth of information is wider in this world, and it is far more participatory. But there are certain types of experiences that cannot be readily conveyed in this more connective, abbreviated form. Complicated, sequential works of persuasion, where each premise builds on the previous one, and where an idea can take an entire chapter to develop, are not well-suited to life on the computer screen. (Much less life on “The O’Reilly Factor.”) I can’t imagine getting along without email, and I derive great intellectual nourishment from posting to my weblog, but I would never attempt to convey the argument of this book in either of those forms... You can convey attitudes and connections in the online world with ease; you can brainstorm with twenty strangers in a way that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. But it is harder to transmit a fully-fledged worldview.