Uneasy Rhetoric

In light of my not-quite-recent post about blogging and misunderstanding, I thought I should point to a Blork Blog post from today.

In “On Writing and Reading,” Blork wonders

does an extremely high volume of on-line consumption not reduce the process of reading down to a simple input function?

The danger I think, is that reading for input does not allow us the time to chew over what we read, to process its meaning and to understand its nuances. Think of it as the difference between drinking a glass of wine and savoring it.

It is a thought worth chewing over. I realized recently that, in sheer numbers of words, I am probably reading more, faster, than I have at any point in my life (and I was a literature major). But I’m getting less out of what I read, and blogging may be contributing to that.

Why? Because one of the cardinal rules of blogging is immediacy. If I can’t respond to something as soon as I consume it, I might as well not respond to it at all. This makes me uncomfortable because I don’t like to write things down until I’ve chewed on what I’m writing for a little bit.

Perhaps blogging will teach people to write tighter prose faster. But the tighter your fist of prose, the more uninvited meaning will slip through your fingers.