Chasing our own Tales, or The Blog is Dead?

Are blogs dead? Are they being repurposed? Is the air going out of the balloon? Are we really on the edge of a no-book, no-newspaper, no-blog world, content to feed on the 140 characters of Twitter? Or have we already arrived?

I was talking with Anna Lefler about all this the other day—spinning out my theories and my unevidentiary evidence—and Anna being Anna (that is, infinitely more connected and tied in than I'll ever be) came back last night quoting an interview with Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and, yes (shudder) a blogger. Keen recently predicted that static blogs (such as the one you are reading, if indeed you are still reading) are on the quick outs, while the sort of "real-time social media personal portal(s)" now being enabled by Wordpress are on the rise. Indeed, in an Editor Unleashed interview with Maria Schneider, Keen declared that "the shy and reticent author" will not survive the near-term future. "Ugly, mute writers," he likewise cautioned, "should probably switch careers."

I read Keen not long after I finished reading Margaret Talbot's fascinating piece in The New Yorker, called "Brain Gain: the underground world of "neuroenhancing" drugs" (I've always been a huge Margaret Talbot fan—perhaps because I, being a very old woman, prefer magazine-y thorough and thoughtful to 140-character nano?). It's the story of a Harvard student, a poker player, and a handful of others (representing the legions of the growing many) who have decided to approach their brains much in the same way that women of a certain age approach their faces: with an eye to cosmetic improvements. Why not off-label Ritalin, a treatment for ADHD, for example, or Provigil, a treatment for narcolepsy, to give oneself a little boost? Why not indulge in what Talbot calls "cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted"? Why not feed your child "smart pills" to help them get ahead? Why not smart-pill yourself, if it can level the playing field against less old, less ugly, less mute, less reticent colleagues?

Well, hmmm. There are reasons. These are drugs after all, and every drug has side effects, some known, some not yet proven, some physical, and some social. Here, for example, is the Harvard student of Talbot's story, describing papers he's written post-enhancement: "...they're verbose. They're belaboring a point, trying to create this airtight argument, when if you just got to your point in a more direct manner it would have been stronger."

Is this...enhanced? Is this...our future? Is this...what we want? Drugs (taken off label) that perhaps verbose-ify and dilute true content, social media that tolerate no more than 140 characters? My small and unenhanced brain tries to accommodate the two thoughts at once and conjures splatter, refractions, lots said, lost meaning. Clearly, I need someone much younger, much prettier, and infinitely less reticent to help me understand how all of this makes for a better world, the sort we're eager to hand down to our children.