Re: Essay vs Blog -- I had the good fortune to come across "American Essays"[1] edited by Charles B. Shaw in a thrift shop some years ago. Shaw opens the book with, in-part:
"The Essay In America
(...)
There is no literary form that embraces so wide a variety of inclusions. Adjectives commonly used to describe the sorts of essays indicate this diversity: familiar, critical, didactic, informal, nature, expository, historical, reflective, travel, personal, descriptive, and humorous are a dozen of these qualifiers. The noun, too, is varied: article, character sketch, causerie, feuilleton, fantasy, anecdote, paper, satire, miscellany, ephemera, impressions, and reverie are another dozen terms applied to the multiformity of the essay. The composition that can be thus diversely denoted cannot be rigidly defined. The essay may be as personal as a toupee or as austere and sublime as a Himalayan peak; it may be as light as the foam on faery seas or erudite as the disquisitions of him whose
"... words of learned length and thundering sound amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around';
it may be fun or the prickliest sort of intellectual stimulation; its ideas may be straws which build bridges or rugged ores polished to the texture of satin. Its range of subject matter is infinite. One might substitute "essay" for "man" in the sentence from Terence's The Self-Tormentor: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns humanity do I deem a matter of indifference to me." In place of a sedate definition perhaps we may compromise on the analogy of the twentieth-century American essayist, Stuart Pratt Sherman: "The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a little river, now with 'bright speed', and now with reluctance and fond lingerings over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humours that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light."
Words from 1954 that I think are a fine lens with which to view both the "blogosphere" and our evolving social media in general.
"The Essay In America (...) There is no literary form that embraces so wide a variety of inclusions. Adjectives commonly used to describe the sorts of essays indicate this diversity: familiar, critical, didactic, informal, nature, expository, historical, reflective, travel, personal, descriptive, and humorous are a dozen of these qualifiers. The noun, too, is varied: article, character sketch, causerie, feuilleton, fantasy, anecdote, paper, satire, miscellany, ephemera, impressions, and reverie are another dozen terms applied to the multiformity of the essay. The composition that can be thus diversely denoted cannot be rigidly defined. The essay may be as personal as a toupee or as austere and sublime as a Himalayan peak; it may be as light as the foam on faery seas or erudite as the disquisitions of him whose
"... words of learned length and thundering sound amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around';
it may be fun or the prickliest sort of intellectual stimulation; its ideas may be straws which build bridges or rugged ores polished to the texture of satin. Its range of subject matter is infinite. One might substitute "essay" for "man" in the sentence from Terence's The Self-Tormentor: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns humanity do I deem a matter of indifference to me." In place of a sedate definition perhaps we may compromise on the analogy of the twentieth-century American essayist, Stuart Pratt Sherman: "The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a little river, now with 'bright speed', and now with reluctance and fond lingerings over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humours that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light."
Words from 1954 that I think are a fine lens with which to view both the "blogosphere" and our evolving social media in general.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B001...