I am currently reading (at Al Hurd's kind suggestion) Ball Four by Jim Bouton, and it occured to me that if that particular project had been conceived today, as opposed to 1969, it might well have been in blog format. After all, there are many similarities between the two. In the book the entries are dated, just as they are in blogs. Bouton charts his year in the 1969 season, for the most part of the season in the then expansion team Seattle Pilots, and for the latter part of the season Houston Astros. He mostly stays on topic, but will on occasion digress on thoughts tangential or unrelated to the central purpose. Like most blogs it is a very 'personal' account. This is not just because it is an autobiography. It is the difference between a conversation and a lecture. Bouton converses, David Attenborough (whose biography I read a year or so ago, and which I enjoyed very much) lectures. The book is opinionated, quite open about it's authors prejudices and points of view. Indeed, just about the only two main differences I can think of between Ball Four and most modern-day blogs is that one it is in paper format, and the others are electronic. Even the very bloggy feature of comments can doubtless be equated to the reader letters, editorial reviews, and the post-publishing furore that apparently took place.
In other words, if you are trying to explain what a blog is to someone, and they have read Ball Four, problem solved. It is also a good example of how much of what apparently makes blogging 'special' is not, in fact, new. The format, if you will, is quite old. It is the immediacy, enabled my modern communications technology, that makes blogging 'new'. Indeed, I think a good case can be made that the basic format goes back nearly two and a half thousand years. What is the basic format? Simple. Contemporaneous writing - that is writing about something as or relatively soon after it happens. Newspapers are a good example of contemporaneous writing, but that particular form of writing only takes us back a few hundred years.
To go back rather more centuries the best example of blog-like writing I know of from my own experience are certain monastic chronicles, or certain portions of others. Let me just quickly explain the necessary proviso. Monastic chronicles came in all shapes and sizes. Some were histories of events before the writer's time. Others were recordings of events of the writer's own day. Some were writen at the instigation of a figure of authority (famously the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was begun at King Alfred's command). Others were pretty much written of the author's own instigation (an example of this would be Gregory of Tour's History of the Franks). The History of the Franks is also an example of a chronicle whose first portions are 'historical' - dealing with the events of the past - but whose latter portions are contemporaneous. Some chronicles are little more than brief annals, others are significantly more wordy. Yet within the contemporaneous ones and portions there are more than a few similarities with today's blogs (and Bouton's book).
Firstly they are contemporaneous. Given the technology constraints of the time it seems likely most chronicles like these were compiled in sections. The writer would make notes for a few years, and then write everything up. Or so it is largely assumed, as with so many things the further back in time, we cannot be entirely sure. In chronicles of a longer duration it s possible to see the wirter alter his view about this or that person over a number of years. Secondly, the accounts are all very personal, and reflect the interests of the writers. In mediaeval times chronicles might have more than one author (being 'continued' by a successor) and a good example of this is the Lanercost chronicle. It has three main authors, and when I read it at university it was suprisingly easy to tell at what point the author changes. One author, for example, was very interested in dreams and visions, and his section is filled with them. Not unlike Glenn Reynolds occasional blog posts about digital cameras, or Professor Bainbridge's asides on wine. These chronicles almost always display a strong geographical bias as well, which many blogs do also (just think about the Minnesotan connection of Powerline for example), as does Ball Four (Bouton on rarely what else is going on the Leagues in 1969 except as it immediately pertains to first the Pilots, and then the Astros).
We do not have blogging in monastic chronicles - just as we do not have it in Ball Four, for the communications technology does not exist. Moreover, mediaeval monastic chronicles were great plaigerists - they most certainly would not have linked in todays world! However, it is wrong to assume these people were existing in isolation. Mostly they would draw and be influenced by the major chronicles of the previous generation (such as The Flower of History by the thirteenth-century monk Matthew Paris), and they would often use the same sources to their own times. This is just like various bloggers today commenting on the same newspaper op-ed. The difference, of course, is that there are relatively few cases where we can show two chroniclers commentating on each other (indeed, the only one that I can immediately recall to mind - and even then I cannot remember the chronicler concerned - is somewhat who was criticising Gregory of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain as being a work of fantasy, which it pretty much is).
Anyway, I hope that shows this format of contemporaneous, personal writing goes back centuries. Indeed, thanks to Gregory of Tours we can push that back to the end of the sixth century AD, over a thousand years. However, there are two notable historians who lived about a thousand years previous to that, who display just the same characterists in their writings. I am, of course, speaking of Xenophon and Thuycidides.
Thucydides wrote The History of the Peleponnesian War, the second earliest work of history in European liteature. He was followed by the third European historian, Xenophon, who wrote a number of historical works, primarily the Hellenica, the Anabasis (the account of the March of the Ten Thousand), and a biography of the Spartan King Agesilaus. What distinguishes both Xenophon and Thucydides from the first historian, Herodotus, and his Historia - literally "Enquiries" - is that Herodotus was writing about events a generation before his time, while they wrote about events in their own time, and in which they sometimes participated. Indeed, the Anabasis is practically autobiographical for Xenophon, as he took part in that fateful expedition and was its commander during the period of its escape. Likewise Thucydides commanded Athenian troops in Thrace in the late 420s, and rallied them after their defeat by the Spartan general Brasidas, all told in his history. Today I suppose they would be called milibloggers.
I feel that I am getting slightly lost now, so I will sum up quickly. Blogging is new, the necessary technology is comparatively recent, and who knows where it will lead. Immediate writing and publishing to a worldwide audience from almost anyone was impossible only a short time before. However, contemporaneous writing, as much blogging is, with commentary and accounts of current events, goes write back to the very beginnings of European literature. Blogging, the new-fangled craze, has roots that go right back to the beginning of western scholarship.
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