It’s About Writing

Dave Winer, in an old Wired interview he doesn’t much like, is quoted as saying:

To me, the Web is not about getting rich. It’s about users, designers, stories, and pictures. It’s a writing environment..

I think he’s exactly right. Blogging, for all the ability to add or link to images, is one of the ways the primacy of text is still apparent on the net. Text is an efficient low-bandwidth form of data, and writing is an artform (well, other people’s writing is).

The next time I teach, whether it’s a freshman composition class or a literature class, I’ll definitely be blogging, and I’ll do my best to incorporate blogging into the syllabus. People take their writing far more seriously when they know they have readers, and when writing is made public, it suddenly is taken far more seriously.