irony

Yes, yes, I am fully aware of the irony of wittering on about how I miss the old-fashioned (or fashioned-old as Bilgewater might have said) letters of yore in a blog.

Comments

[Tim Footman]

I don't think so. The great thing about those letters - and I did the same, huge screeds, consciously tacky note paper, rolling off on multiple tangents (RIP), doodling in the margins, spontaneous poetry, injunctions to READ THIS / WATCH THIS / HEAR THIS, badges wrapped in bubblewrap (lest they punch a hole in the envelope), etc, etc. But the point was that they were personal, crafted, bespoke - created with the specific recipient in mind.

Blogs have a different role - general, open to anyone who stumbles across them. What they've killed (or, to look at it another way, transformed) is fanzines

[alistair]

i guess i was probably thinking more of the irony of me voicing those thoughts in an electronic form rather than specifically a blog. I agree with you that if they 'killed' anything then blogs did for the fanzine. And i'm aware that there is a risk of sounding like an old grouch, but i do worry that long form writing is a dissappearing art, as new generation eschew not just the notebook and paper letters, but also even the idea of email - communicating instead in fractured snippets of code (literally) on social networks comment facilities. A bit like this then, really. ha ha.