Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

From May Issue of First Things:

Wheaton College professor Alan Jacobs on the evolution of blogs mirroring that of commonplace books:

It was probably inevitable that commonplace books would eventually blend with another early-modern invention, the journal. By 1720, when Jonathan Swift writes “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” and recommends the keeping of a commonplace book, he seems to have something very like a journal in mind: “A book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.” It’s interesting that Swift thinks that by writing down the thoughts and ideas of others you are “making them your own”; elsewhere in the letter he refers to such a book as a bank from which you can make withdrawals of wit and wisdom. As T.S. Eliot would later say, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Swift recommends theft.

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It is curious that the history of the weblog, insofar as it can be fully understood, mirrors that of the commonplace book. The term weblog seems to have been coined by a very strange man named Jorn Barger, and for him it is simply a log of interesting stories he discovers on the Web. It consists of links with brief descriptions, nothing more. But of course what most of us now think of when we use the word blog is a kind of online journal or diary; and that is indeed the path the weblog or blog has, generally speaking, followed. What was once a log of things other people said on the Web is now a log of my own life, which I make available to readers, and which may (but need not) contain links and references. So when we speak of blogs we don’t mean what Jorn Barger does; we mean—well, something like what Jonathan Swift recommended to his young poet friend: “a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading [or viewing or iPod-listening] or conversation.”