Blogging with (bad) style

For, well, about 6 months now I've been meaning to riff on this riff about internet writing from Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. As I can't seem to get in tune, or plugged in, or somehting, I'll just let Steamboats take it away:

If I were to interpret those tugs, I would say that writing on the internet tends to be more popular when it satisfies the reader's wish to be connected—the wish not to miss out. The writer, too, may have such a wish. I admit that I love it when another blog links to mine; there is great consolation in the feeling of having a posse. And of course many readers online are also writers there. Perhaps these feelings of "groupiness" explain a few more traits of internet style. There is a greater tolerance online for sloppy and inexact writing—not merely for typos but for a generalized kludginess of thought, especially the errors that the usage stickler H. W. Fowler named "haziness," "swapping horses," and "unequal yokefellows," which may all be loosely described as changing your mind about the grammatical structure of a sentence halfway through writing it—and such tolerance is to be expected if people are reading primarily for the sake of a feeling of belonging.

....

This willingness in readers to overlook form raises a question as to whether online writing entertains, in the traditional sense of the word. I am not sure that it does. Reading online does not seem to me to be a pleasure in itself but a response to irritation. That is, it is not like eating an ice cream cone; it is like scratching an itch. I am only reporting on my own feelings here, of course, but while I am doing so, let me report a further kink in them. Between us, my boyfriend and I subscribe to more than a dozen magazines, and if I pick one up, I know instantly that I am goofing off. Online reading, however, fails to set off my leisure detection system.

But reading blogs, in my experience, leaves me more addled and nervous than when I began. This work-like character makes the internet particularly corrosive , by the way, to the productivity of those who work at home, such as writers. Through web browsing, the freelancer communes with the procrastinating office drone—at his peril, because the freelancer receives no weekly paycheck.

Comments

[JR]

I read the whole thing. I am sooo tired!
JR