Lexicon: blog

The Media Ecology Association list recently advertised Andrew Sullivan's piece "Why I Blog," published in November 2008's The Atlantic. Sullivan began blogging eight years ago, as a means of publishing new writing in a spontaneous fashion. What began as an outlet created by a web designer friend developed into an addiction "like taking a narcotic."

Sullivan traces the etymology of the word blog and delves into the early and recent history of blogging. He also acknowledges a historic legacy of written expressions of immediate thought:

"If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument. Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas."

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