As I read it online I guess it was a worthless point of view - if I'd bought the Guardian it would have had so much more weight and been a worthwhile article.

I'm sure the invention of the printing press brought similar comments from minstrels complaining that this new fangled idea was ruining the oral tradition.

I don't see why reading something online will prevent people from having worthwhile points of view and gaining an education. Maybe she's looking in the wrong places.

On a lighter note I listened to Howl this morning and followed it with the Clash - I thought to myself how many people do I know who could have that segue - er Phil I thought!!

I've been thinking more about this!

If I recall correctly Dickens published many of his great works in a regular column in a newspaper as did Armisted Maupin with Tales of the City. In their way these were the "blogs" of their day. There is nothing to say that a future work of great import couldn't start as a blog.

She says about "We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned" - I think this is an incredibly ignorant statement because the certainties of a few decades ago weren't the certainties of a few decades before that! Things change and evolve all the time and every generation points to the new and says it will destroy all that has gone before. What she really means is that the modern generation don't think or behave in the way she thinks they should - a common complaint of the elder generation.

It reminds me of an author (think it was Orwell) railing against the "Penny dreadful's" - mass pulp entertainment for the masses. There will always be an "opium for the people" and those who can look beyond the mundane and frivolous. The Internet won't change that anymore than TV did or cheap mass produced books before that.

Anyway I'll get off me soapbox now.

What do you think Mr S?

I agree with you in almost every respect here, Kevin (tho' I suspect Orwell postdated the term 'penny dreadful', or indeed 'penny blood' which I learnt from a Radio 4 programme recently) by a few decades - were you thinking of his "Decline of the English Murder", about the Sunday popular press ?

But yeah, I can see how my reposting of Lessing might have been mistaken for general chauvinism, as indeed her original article might. What I think both of us meant (I certainly did)was that for someone struggling with the mechanics of writing a sustained manuscript (be it novel, poetry, history, biography, etc) the easy access to technology and its instant satisfactions are quite a temptation, and even if we only intend to participate, in the most democratic and modern spirit, with a general discussion such as the Web is really good at providing, it's not difficult to find, as DL points out, that a whole day has passed in blogging. That doesn't denigrate the medium, or its regular or better-time-managed participants, but it can be a serious problem for those of us who are less disciplined or less confident of their ability to reach an audience by other means. Who, after all, wouldn't prefer a ready and instant audience for his/her ideas over the uncertain investment of months (sometimes years) in a piece of writing that may never see the light of publication ?

You will notice that my own blogs have reached the sporadic stage. And yet, I signed up to Facebook yesterday. There surely has to be something in it...

As to segues, I particularly relish in occasionally putting my entire music collection into one Grand Playlist and playing it on shuffle. I reckon it sounds like the Ultimate John Peel Show - every time !

Hope you and your family had a good Christmas. Happy New Year to you all. Perhaps we ought to arrange to meet up in 2008, and bore our respective spouses to death with music arcana...?