Romantic Blogging

Honestly, I have been having a hard time blogging about the romantic writings that we have studied. There seems to be a sort of dire disconnect, beyond the immediate removal from time and place, from the piece of literature to the technology, that I can not overcome whenever I sit down to blog. So when my friend said she was going to a seminar on blogging (with free beer), I decided to see if I could gain some perspective.

I thought about the composition of a romantic work and that of a blog; is blogging a forum through which we can truly address our emotions "recollected in tranquility"? I would argue that the very nature of the blogging often deters us from this. Blogs, as I was told, are meant to be malleable and concise because of the media to which they are tied. The nature of the Internet is far removed from knowledge as it had once been viewed. Yet in its essence it is simply a a vast linkage of all material knowledge translated into indecipherable codes in a seemingly unearthly realm (alas Blake would not find full freedom from the material on the web)? So why do people feel they can say all sorts of things on the web that they cannot in their everyday life? And what about that malleable nature of what we post? When we have the ability to monitor who exactly visits our site and can delete whatever critical comments we feel offend us, are we really ever allowing true human discussion and ideas to fully form? As we looked at bodies of text as if they were Frankenstein's monster, when we publish a book, we cannot control it; once it is published, the creation becomes its own entity. With blogs we can shape and reshape our creation over and over (I've edited this three times). We do not have to stick by our ideas therefore we do not let the creation stand for itself. It is as if we are frightened to let it do so anymore.

The Internet seems to satisfy our Manfredian desire to know everything, to have every power at our fingertips, yet we do not want this power to belong to everyone else when it comes to exposing our own ideas. The Internet is certainly out of any individual's control, yet we believe there is some power out there that could send it crashing down (bring the actual world down with it?). Tangible books and hard copies of writing have not really changed format; perhaps they represent Blakeian heaven, and the internet, always changing and remanifesting itself, is his hell. Can one truly get by today without descending into the possible evil of the web? Will this hell devour all the hard-back books that belong to heaven? If this happens, could the internet possibly decay taking all knowledge with it? What type of worm would wriggle through the lines of html and what would come out the other end?