400 Years of Blogging

400 Years of Blogging:

‘Blogs’ have been with us for some four hundred years although obviously their form and means of distribution has changed. The invention of moveable type enabled the relatively inexpensive production of printed material as well as an increasingly literate society, although even today I have witnessed the ‘shared newspaper’ experience in Africa, so being illiterate doesn’t preclude access to the news and it might be argued that sharing the experience of having someone reading the news in a collective setting is a definite advantage.

The early ‘bloggers’ like Thomas Paine suffered imprisonment and worse for publishing tracts that the state found embarrassing and in fact the earliest ‘sedition’ laws came about as a direct response to the ‘self-published’ pamphlet, so fearful was the state of the spread of ideas contrary to the dominant ideology.

And up until the 20th century, many pulled no punches in their descriptions of the ruling elite that even today, would not be tolerated..........
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