On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night. There is a vividness to this immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print.Read the full piece The Atlantic. Sullivan, a blogger since 2000, says blogs are changing the way we think, the way we record and the way we consume news and information. He says a lots of other things of course in a lengthy article that doesn't seem so lengthy at all.
Which also reminds me of a point Gideon Haigh made in The Monthly recently, while discussing the "essay" as a form of writing.
Two thousand competently executed words in a newspaper often seems too many and yet 6000 words of superbly executed non-fiction narrative writing in New Yorker or Atlantic somehow seems not quite enough. It seems to me that subjects, perhaps at the point of 5000 words suddenly become exponentially more interesting and they're more satisfying for a writer to explore. You're suddenly moving out of the cliche sphere and the subject sort of develops a texture and it begins to exhibit those paradoxes and contradictions that make life interesting.
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