The Blog Writer

Is blogging real writing? This guy says it is:

[I]t occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing -- writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder. It's just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

Link.

Well, yes, but blogging is a type of writing, just as graffiti (at least the type that uses sentences) is a type of writing.

I enjoy blogging. I think it's a type of writing, but it's different than "regular" writing. Blog writing is more like verbal print: more spontaneous, not proofread as carefully, flippant. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, but I think blogging fits the media: the Internet and the screen. For whatever reason, the screen doesn't lend itself to long and thoughtful reading. If people want lengthy prose, they'll read a book or long essays, not the Internet. That's what I've been led to understand, and such an understanding reflects my reading experience. When I stumble across an appealing essay on the Internet and then see it's lengthy, I'm bummed. Yet I read books all the time. Odd, huh? I don't feign to understand it, but I do recognize it. The electronic medium demands a different type of writing than books and, to a lesser extent, magazines. And blog writing fits that medium well.