As far as the readings go this is my second favorite so far besides the Rheingold article about the Amish. Elbow perfectly maps out his ideas and that is a lot of what draws me to make such a statement as the one above. I agree with Elbow that writing is more permanent than speech and that is part of what sometimes pushes people away from it. The idea of someone’s words being engraved forever in print is actually a very scary concept. On blogs we can simply erase or edit the things that we once wrote and may be having second thoughts about. I suppose that is the beauty of technology. Factual or historical books can do similar things, but that usually happens every few years when a new edition is printed.
As Elbow notes there is also this definite need to fee like what is being written is wholeheartedly 100% correct because it is so permanent. I was doing a lot of thinking after reading this piece and one thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was the idea that blogging is so very conversational that it is basically a hybrid of oral and written culture. Sure I am writing down things (or in this case typing), but the informal way in which it is written makes it very much an oral thing. I often read blog entries aloud because it makes more sense to hear the words. I was also quite struck by the idea that we are all in fact pre-literates when we are babies. The way in which we do eventually learn to speak and write is fascinating.