Blogging (well, writing) then and now
Posted on February 10, 2008
Filed Under All, Taking Faith, Weblogging, Context |
Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) wrote every day for fifty years. He created a ‘bookshelf’ of titles on cultural evolution according to Rodney Stark in his book Discovering God, and was the originator of the Ghost Theory of primitive religion ’spelled out and illustrated in massive detail.’
Spencer’s theory was eventually dismissed as ‘nonsense’ by scholars. Spencer’s crime was that he combed the available literature only for passages that supported his views, ignoring work that plainly contradicted his theory.
In the past, I’ve written about the link I see between the ‘age of letters’ and bloggers: both featured writers taking advantage of new networks (reliable postal systems and cheap printing technology, and the Internet, respectively) to explore and develop ideas. It’s interesting that Spencer, self educated after turning down an opportunity to attend Cambridge, chose to focus on cultural evolution.
Most blogs are about evolving culture IMHO: the lesson to be learned here, is that, eventually, in any networked community, shoddy work is ultimately revealed as such, whether in the 19th or the 21st centuries. It happens a bit more quickly on the Internet: unfortunately less-than-stellar work can be influential, even after it’s revealed as substandard…
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