Garrison Keillor in an op-ed piece in the New York Times laments the end of publishing and the proliferation of cheap words:
We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.
With the internet no one needs ink and paper to “publish” his or her opinions. “18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives…”
So the question is whether this democratization of published opinions is a good thing, or just too dang noisy.