I stumbled across this passage in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting yesterday, and was struck by the way it seems to anticipate both blogging and the Internet as a whole. This was written in 1978:

"…A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is a lover. But my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers)…

…Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me sympomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times highter than in Israel...)

But by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worses isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside."

That last part must be what blogging was like before there was no Internet. Now things have changed a little.

For instance, I learn from Google that this guy was here first.