Blog-bashers and Other Curmudgeons

As an exercise in provoking bloggers Jonathan Rauch’s suggestion that the internet is, like, totally hopeless is splendid. So there’s that. But as a plausible critique? Not so much. For instance, Mr Rauch – with whom I am guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan this week – writes:

For people who want to read and think, which is still a lot of people, the worldwide web is an incorrigibly hostile environment. Thank goodness, it is already in the process of being displaced by the far more reader-friendly world of apps, which is hospitable to quality writing and focused reading, as opposed to knee-jerk opinionating and attention-deficit-disordered skimming. The blogging format, I believe, was an outgrowth of a particular technological moment, specifically the gap between the decline of paper and the rise of HTML5. Its heyday is over. There are a few great bloggers out there. Andrew Sullivan is one of them. But they’re depressingly rare.  If some strange magnetic pulse wiped out every blog post written since the format began, hardly anything memorable or important would be lost; and, after 15 years or whatever, it’s too late to hope for maturation.