Blogging, Now and Then (250 years ago)
Long before the Internet, Europeans exchanged information in ways that anticipated blogging. The key element of their information system was the “anecdote,” a term that meant nearly the opposite then from what it means today. Anecdotes, dispensed by “libellistes” and “paragraph men,” became a staple in the daily diet of news consumed by readers in eighteenth-century France and England. They were also pilfered, reworked, and served up in books. By tracking anecdotes through texts, we can reassess a rich strain of history and literature.
Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library. He is the author of, among other books, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Vintage Books, 1985), George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (W.W. Norton, 2003), The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (Public Affairs, 2010), and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Harvard University Press, 2010).