Say Everything

What’s it about?: This is basically a history of blogging as an overall process, and its impact on the media, politics, business, and our personal lives.

My opinion: A very concise history of the voice of content creators on the internet, from the 90s until the book’s publication. It’s a great text to have in your library, if you have any sort of interest in the history of blogging or the evolution of online content. It was first published in 2009, in a time that many consider to be a golden age for blogging and independent content creation, before the big companies took over everything.

Of course, this so-called golden age had plenty of issues as well, and the book does not ignore this. Yes, the technologies made it easy for users to create content and interact with users, but this also saw the beginning of money coming from user data, and some organisations have grown too big for their own good. Say Everything does a great job in capturing an era that sat between how it started and how it’s going.

This book crystallises something that many have known for a while now: Blogging is a process that allows one to bypass the gatekeepers of established media to essentially become their own printing press. And that’s one of the best things about the medium — that here is no arbitrary minimum requirement to start a blog; you can just go ahead and do it, without waiting for anyone’s permission. Of course, it is rare for a blogger to reach the scale of the traditional printing press, but everyone is given the opportunity, technically.

The same principles apply to anyone who spends any amount of time creating anything online, whether it be video or audio streaming, photoblogs, AI artwork, or just plain old written-word blogging. It’s all publishing in some form or another.

And it’s not like Rosenberg goes back in time to find the very first blogger, which would just be absurd. Instead, he goes through the ways in which blogging gradually came together as a medium, and then his analysis and commentary follows. Working with a great deal of information, and condensing it for laypeople such as myself. Definitely feels right to me, and totally appropriate for a book like this.

Say Everything may be dated now, being published when Web 2.0 was reaching its apex, but the principles of creation and commentary are as relevant as ever.