Books and Blogs

Tech blogger, Ben Thompson, wrote this great blog on the key difference between books and blogs (Beyond the obvious one: size):

“A book, by necessity, is a finished object.”

Which is perfectly ok in case of say, novels. But on almost any serious topic, as Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“The trouble is that essays (or books) always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”

A blog, on the other hand, is not a manuscript. Rather, Thompson says it is an “intellectual exploration directly and on an ongoing basis”:

“While books remained a fantastic medium for stories, both fiction and non, blogs were not only good enough, they were actually better for ideas closely tied to a world changing far more quickly than any book-related editorial process can keep up with.”

He cites as an example his idea/concept of something called Aggregation Theory (Don’t worry: for this blog, it doesn’t matter what that is):

“My thinking on what Aggregation Theory is, what its implications are, and how that should affect strategy both inside and outside of technology and, particularly over the last year, potential regulation, has evolved considerably.”

Thus, today, he’s glad he can “link to something that represents my point of view in 2017, not just 2015”. Or as he ends so eloquently:

“I don’t really see the point of trees that are dead, literally or virtually.”