Blogging: The Next Evolutionary Step in Essaying

Scot McKnight has a very good post--he says that the Emergent conversation is best understood as the literary form called the "essay."

I'd say that blogging is an interesting animal in the essay category...
Because a blog is not really a blog if you don't get to know the person writing it.

Scot wrote that blogging "is essayist -- unless, of course, it is the simple journal form where someone tells us what she is doing today."

However, I think that this is an essential element to a real blog--it is not just disconnected thoughts from somebody you’re not getting to know. Instead, it is an interpersonal conversation. Interspersed throughout a good blog are tidbits of interpersonal communication that allows you to create a relationship with the blogger. What makes blogging so unique is that you grow to understand the person and what he or she is living through as they ruminate on the topics in their more “essayistic” posts.

This is a wonderful step in the evolution of the essay: the creation of a virtual conversational community. When you are in conversation with friends, you “shoot the breeze”—you talk about sports, your kids, what you did over the weekend—as well as about serious matters. And the “shooting the breeze” makes the serious conversations that much more rewarding.