IDÉE FIXE: Portrait Of The Blogger As A Young Man Some thoughts on where weblogging fits.

…Even if it’s true the vast majority of

blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of

people were the earth to open up and swallow

them, and even if the best are still no substitute for

the sustained attention of literary or journalistic

works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not

what Web logs are about anyway. At their most

interesting they embody something that exceeds

attention, and transforms it: They are constructed

from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly

contemporary sort of wonder. A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is

to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the

world of letters but to the early history of museums

— to the “cabinet of wonders,” or Wunderkammer,

that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance

modernity: a random collection of strange,

compelling objects, typically compiled and owned

by a learned, well-off gentleman.

There’s an informative (I hope) portrait of Jorn Barger interwoven into the article as well.

Robot wisdom? That’s as good an encapsulation as

any, and none are very good. Barger’s ideas are at

once subtle and florid, and they don’t summarize

easily. Suffice it to say that they’re as much literary

as scientific, and that they orbit a complicated

connection between artificial intelligence and the

masterworks of James Joyce. Barger discovered that

link in the midst of trying to map out a

programmable taxonomy of human emotions…