Are Bloggers The Descendents Of Caesar?
Glenn Reynolds links to an NPR article that suggests as much, saying that Caesar’s Gallic War writings were sort of like blog posts.
I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but there is a historical context for blogging. I’ve always thought that the pamphleteers of the Revolutionary War era were a lot like bloggers. They were simply political activists with access to printing presses who wrote relatively short essays about politics and current events. Obviously blogging is a lot more widespread given that more people today have access to the internet than had access to a printing press in the late 1700’s, but the comparison is apt none the less I think.
In fact, when I started blogging I thought about writing under the name James Thomson Callender, a pamphleteer who rose to some infamy under the Adams and Jefferson administrations. He was a staunch anti-Federalist and supporter of Thomas Jefferson (he single-handedly sunk Alexander Hamilton’s political career by revealing an affair he had with one Maria Reynolds) until Jefferson spurned him for a federal appointment (as postmaster of Richmond, if I remember correctly) at which point he trained his rhetorical guns on our third President and initiated the nation’s first Presidential sex scandal. Callendar accused Jefferson of fathering children with a mulatto slave named Sally Hemmings, which is scandal that is still hotly contested to this very day.
Callender was not a journalist. He was not objective. He had an agenda. He was a scandalmonger, but his writings weren’t often inaccurate either. I think of bloggers, in general, as sort of the same way.
By the way, Callender would have been a rather ironic pick for my nom de plume given that he was an anti-Federalist. I’ve always thought of myself as being rather Hamiltonian in my political outlook.
