KJ
Selections
by
Robert Brady
The
term ‘blog’ is on everyone’s tongue nowadays, where
some find it not very tasteful, mistakenly believing that blogs are
rank upstarts without tradition. Neither is the case, as the following
brief history — organically commencing with what will one day
be known among blogologists as paleoblogging — makes perfectly
clear.
The earliest known examples of blogging, apart from the network of cave
paintings — oldest evidence of the human need to blog —
are probably the Sumerian clay tablets: early prototypes of the hard
disk, but with data impressed by wooden stylus, in lieu of a keyboard.
The tablets were then stacked up in rooms where, for want of a decent
search engine and complete lack of RAM they weren’t accessed for
thousands of years, until some specialists at last extracted them by
pick and shovel, an early form of data mining. Pharaonic tomb walls
are another example of paleoblogging technology, which even had a virtual
hypertext, afterlifewise.
Other early attempts at virtual hypertext include the Bible, widely
acknowledged as the first multiple-author blog. Things then got a bit
more authorially organized and along came personal quill-and-parchment
efforts, historically notable among them Caesar’s records of the
conquest of Gaul, one of the early political blogs.
Surfing ahead a bit among the highlights of blogging history we come
to Samuel Pepys, an early pioneer in cryptosecurity who, for reasons
of personal privacy, blogged in an early version of SHTTP, which, unlike
the top-notch security systems of today, wasn’t successfully hacked
for nearly 300 years. Another notable protoblogger was Henry Thoreau,
who cut-and-pasted his earlier handwritten blogs into the dead-tree
version those who still read books know as Walden.
And now that there are said to be three million blogs in Japan and climbing
fast, we must mention from among many others the Japanese protobloggers
Murasaki Shikibu (Genji blog), Sei Shonagon (Pillowbook
blog) and of course Basho, grandfather of the travel blog, who wandered
wireless around Japan for decades, recording his many experiences in
poetic fashion using unlinkable ink, which nevertheless links directly
to today, and the magazine you are now holding.
Thus, as this brief historical purview indicates, blogging is but one
tiny blossom on the big, ancient and well-rooted tree that flowers with
human expression. As one of those multiple authors mentioned above might
have put it, were he alive today, “There is nothing new under
the sun, and that includes blogs.” For hands-on realization of
one small difference between Sumerian blogging and the modern version,
click here.
Robert
Brady, who has been keeping a journal since the 1960s, has taken up
the blog format as a natural extension, in which he now engages pretty
much daily at purelandmountain.com
Copyright
held by the author
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