Robert McCrum: 'Would Orwell have been a blogger' ?

Robert McCrum has a thought-provoking essay in the  September 2, 2007, online edition of The Observer of London headlined "Would Orwell have been a blogger?" He's referring to India-born Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote provocative books such as Animal Farm , Nineteen Eighty-Four and the less generally known "Politics and the English Language  under the pen name George Orwell. Orwell also wrote a number of other books and essays.

McCrum's essay is a take-off from Politics and the English Language. He acknowledges such when he writes:

Most people who bother at all would probably admit that the English of the worldwide web - verbose, rambling and ill-tempered - is not really the kind they want to  read in a book or a newspaper. But it's generally assumed that, because this is the web, we cannot do a thing about it.

Our civilisation has been transformed by the Internet in a way unprecedented since the time of Gutenberg and Caxton and the means of mass communication, so the argument runs, must adapt to the global language of 24/7. It follows that any struggle against the abuse and impoverishment of English in blogs and emails is a sentimental archaism. Underneath this belief lies the recognition that language is a natural growth and not an instrument we can shape for or police for better self-expression.

"Does any of this sound familiar?" McCrum asks. "If you look up Orwell's Politics and the English Language, you will find that I have simply adapted his opening paragraph - and his more general concerns about the language - for the Internet. It's interesting to do this because among Orwell's heirs, the writers and journalists of today, there's anxiety about the quality of English prose in the lawless domains of cyberspace."

Frankly, I like the informality of Internet writing. This doesn't mean I don't care about misspelled words, run-on sentences and a lack of punctuation. I do. It's just that if I can understand what you wrote I don't put too much emphasis on how you said it. However, I try not to quote badly written posts out of respect for TBJ readers.

By the way, when I want really serious, highbrow stuff I go to the Deep Web. That's where the scholars who don't want to swim with the masses can be found.

Technorati tags: Robert McCrum, The Observer, George Orwell, Eric Arthur Blair, Politics and the English Language, Would Orwell have been a blogger