Jonathan Rauch (we discuss his concept of demosclreosis several times) hates not only blogging, but the impact of blogging on discourse. He suggests that the way we interface in a blogging environment makes a particular type of discourse more likely to emerge.
Its an interesting point. The technology impacts political discourse. We know this already of course. The development of radios changed the executive branch, and television impacted the type of people we elect president. Which just now seem to be fully coming to terms with the way the bloggosphere impacts politics. The reviews are not good, but change seems underway.
For people who want to read and think, which is still a lot of people, the worldwide web is an incorrigibly hostile environment. Thank goodness, it is already in the process of being displaced by the far more reader-friendly world of apps, which is hospitable to quality writing and focused reading, as opposed to knee-jerk opinionating and attention-deficit-disordered skimming. The blogging format, I believe, was an outgrowth of a particular technological moment, specifically the gap between the decline of paper and the rise of HTML5. Its heyday is over.
