Sarah Boxer [Editor]

Me? A Luddite?

I do show a number of early warning signs. I prefer by several degrees of magnitude to talk with a live human being, whether I’m placing a restaurant reservation or booking a ?ight. I am annoyed—sometimes highly—by people sending BlackBerry text messages or tuning iPods while I explain how modern Atlanta might bene?t from a second visit by Gen. Sherman or as I lament the dismissive critical treatment given Norman Mailer now that he’s naked and dead.

In fact, I keenly felt like a Luddite in my very ?rst staff meet at Paste magazine. I bounded into a crowded room set to engage in Meaningful Dialogue and Sparkling Idea Generation. Instead, an entire roomful of writers and editors stared in silent blue trances at personal computer screens. Hello? Anybody home? Want to share a few thoughts on hidden themes of persecution in the works of Lynyrd Skynyrd?

Sarah Boxer’s new book offers a guy like me the possibility of redemption, a way to newly appreciate the web log, an activity that I have heretofore viewed as one of the most self-indulgent time-wasting distractions of modern times.

Blogs have, in my estimation, replaced good old-fashioned onanism as the activity most likely to eat up personal time and more meaningful human contact. We now have an estimated 77 million blogs, a great global jamboree of self-expression that might—or might not—be completely healthy.

My concerns aren’t new. We live in a world that’s as separated as connected by electronica, with too many of us starved for real human-to-human community. Technology has led to rehab camps in Korea that treat users for their 17-hour-a-day Internet addiction. The very Silicon Valley nerds who wired our world now take seriously the advice of a former kickboxer whose new best-seller, The Four-Hour Work Week, says basically: Check email just once a day.

So, I pose a Luddite’s question: Is the blog generally a valuable form of self-expression … or simply self-indulgence? Does blogging help us engage the world … or evade it?

Sarah Boxer, ex of The New York Times, culls mightily from the Amazons, Niles and Mississippis of blog ?ow. Her journey begins as a blog neophyte, and ends in her Top 25 blog choices. Many of the destinations are funny and fascinating, not to mention attractive in their intentions.

Boxer gives us one blog from a Nobel Prize-winning economist who talks in economic terms about social issues such as gender selection of babies in China. There’s a cartoonist who keeps us up to date on the hand-drawn adventures of rats interacting with a piece of shit. We get the critical ravings of an “Angry Black Bitch”; selections from the diary of 17th-century London chronicler Samuel Pepys; and a more contemporary, gritty diary from an Alabama Marine stationed in Fallujah in 2006.

Want to go deep into theoretical physics and get worked up over dark matter? Check out a blog called Cosmic Variance. Boxer includes still more from a political muckraker; a classical-music blog written by New Yorker critic Alex Ross; plus a sidebar from a blogger—re: the Illiad of Homer—in which lines of brand-new epic poetry are delivered from the quill of an imagined Greek soldier without a great deal of sympathy for his leaders or the Trojan War.

And there’s more—blogs that cleverly instruct on the Swedish language, on making it through miscarriages, and on being (purportedly) handsome: El Guapo in DC is a truly funny re?ection by a Guatemalan-American blogger who may indeed be God’s gift to women. Or perhaps a contemporary version of Saturday Night Live’s wild-and-crazy guys.

Boxer has selected well, and, at times, I felt informed and energized by this collection.

Yet I remain unconvinced. Several pieces in Boxer’s sampler are delicious, but I still put down this book with no real compulsion to spend many hours of my life—however much of it happily remains—glued to the next postings of even these smart and creative essayists, thinkers, newsmen and cartoonists.

I’ll go for a walk instead, and out there under the new spring leaves share a few thoughts on life, speak with a friend or two: live humans who laugh when I laugh, who hug and high-?ve and cry, real-time.

Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World of a drug called soma that made society self-satis?ed, internalized, indifferent to all cares. I think a case may be made that soma isn’t Prozac or some other mood pharmaceutical, but modern technology—TV, iPods, the web, all of it.

Could 77 million blogs be a symptom of some ailment that separates our 21st-century souls instead of connecting them?