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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
Monsters of Achievement | Comment [11]
Where's Czechoslovakia? | Comment [27]
The Bad Cover | Comment [61]
Tickle Me Emo | Comment [16]
Painting 2.0 | Comment [9]
Featured Articles By the Author
The Real History of Blogging
As any reader who’s been following my posts (especially the last few posts on taste) must know by now, I am deeply attracted to 18th-century ideas. Blogging, however — not just my blogging, but all blogging — is not an 18th-century invention.
Most people think that blogging began in the 1990s, but this turns out to be one of those erroneous statements that shows up all too frequently on Wikipedia (that darn site is full of so many mistakes that I, for one, refuse to use it any more). Actually, blogging began more than 400 years ago.
The first blogger was Michel de Montaigne, a Frenchman who lived in the village of Montaigne, and later became its mayor (as Eddie Izzard would say, “How convenient is that? The guy’s name is Montaigne and he lives in the town of Montaigne!”). Montaigne began blogging in 1580, and blogged more or less without interruption for about eight years.
Because computers were slow back then (the Egyptians invented them—another little known fact, one that Wikipedia really has mucked up big-time), and extremely expensive, only super-rich and powerful people, like the king of France and a few of Montaigne’s super-rich friends, were wired. Consequently, they were the only people who bothered to read his blog. In one post Montaigne flat out said that he wrote only for himself and “a few men” — unlike contemporary bloggers, who are devoted to democratic principles and address everybody — the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.
Even though he was the first blogger, Montaigne instinctively knew what was at the heart of blogging: Human beings are a deeply prejudiced lot who see things through very dark lenses that prevent them from seeing their own prejudices. Expose those prejudices to the light and people get very agitated. One of his greatest posts (among a ton of great posts — I swear, just go to www.montaigne.blogspot.com) was when he wrote about how the learned are especially prejudiced, and if you want to know the truth, you’ve got to find people who aren’t learned.
In some ways, the guy sounded a lot like contemporary bloggers. He wrote a post about how he’d “never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself” (wow, talk about self-absorbed) and he wrote on all sorts of matters like, oh, you know, eating human flesh and the like. He was excited about exploring ideas that just happened to hit him on any given day. Sometimes his posts were a little long (he always exceeded the recommended daily limit of 500 words), but he kept his audience (himself and his friends) hopping.
But in an important respect, Montaigne’s blogging was entirely unlike contemporary blogging. In one of his earliest posts, he wrote the following:
“I like to argue and discuss, but only with a few men and for myself. For to serve as a spectacle to the great and to show off competitively one’s wit and one’s babble is, I find, a very inappropriate occupation for an honorable man.”
Even though he himself babbled about an endless array of topics (he was one of the most prolific bloggers of all times), as the first blogger, Montaigne recognized the dangers his babbling posed. He knew that blogging is a competitive business, where whoever’s got the best (today, we would say, “nastiest”) wit and babble counts the most.
Another great blogger was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By his time, however, the computer had become a lot cheaper and was much more widespread. Lots of people read his blog (www.Rousseau.blogger.com), and some of his posts were so provocative and alarming that his commentators would run him out of town — once they even ran him out of the country!
Rousseau was like Montaigne — deeply self-contradictory in maligning blogging, while at the same time obviously loving to do it. More than Montaigne, however, Rousseau was a little — shall we say — obsessed with himself, his own habits, and his own innermost thoughts, and he was determined to display them to the whole world.
Rousseau was even more afraid of the dangers of blogging than Montaigne. In his very first post, he called blogging a “dangerous Pyrrhonism” — an activity whose nonstop yammering got in the way of people ever taking a stand on anything.
Today’s bloggers aren’t perturbed in the least by blogging’s putative dangers. Bloggers and commentators alike love the free-form tussle, argument and discussion blogging invites.
The only real difference between today’s bloggers and commentators and the old bloggers and commentators is that we write so much better and more profoundly than those old guys. My guess is that those clumsy, slow computers they were forced to work with held them back.
Posted at 06:08:57 PM on May 19, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
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Taking the “French” cue from this blog’s host, filling in the seventeenth century blogger spot would be La Rochefoucauld, whose Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims was scandalous for its sarcasm and pessimistic view of human nature.
Of course, unlike Montaigne, to my knowledge he did not have his own personal sauterne winery (Chateau d’Yquem) providing the “spirits” for his Essays.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 19, 07:08 PM · #
Merci de nous rappeler à nous français que les blogs ont été inventés par Michel et Jean-Jacques.
Il leur a manqué les commentaires de leurs lecteurs. Encore qu’encore aujourd’hui leurs lecteurs commentent ces écrits.
— serdan · May 20, 03:21 AM · #
Serdan:
Je vous remercie de votre commentaire, et je suis d’accord. Mais quant à Rousseau, je crois que Voltaire était un grand lecteur!
— Laurie Fendrich · May 20, 06:06 PM · #
I tried to find this blog on blogspot, but it was removed. Does anyone know why?
— PepGiraffe · Jun 3, 02:51 PM · #