Blogging: type vs write?

BLOGGING. Is it the writing medium for today's audience? Are the thoughtful days of writing the great Australian novel, an investigative feature article or simply putting pen to paper numbered? Are we reading less? If so, are we thinking less? Are we drowning in information overload but not getting much knowledge? Perhaps we're running around too much and consequently suffering from short on time syndrome (I've accepted that since having a baby there's no way I can ever finish reading an article from The Monthly now but take comfort in the knowledge the cover story is not an article -- it's an essay, which takes me back to the 1990s and reading in the dark corners of the library during my university days or the last time I read an essay). Or are we just being lazy? It seems all we need today is to be ironic or witty and readers offer praise. 

From the little I know about what there is to know, good writing takes great planning, which requires ideas, thinking and thorough research -- not to mention the gruelling editing process (whatever happened to the dark red pen and the lost literary art of using proofreading symbols to correct grammar, punctuation and long sentences). It seems the ink has run dry. 

Most bloggers, I suspect, if they're anything like me, don't plan what they're going to write about or do they? I don't mainly due to the time constraints that come along with a new baby not that this was ever mentioned in the antenatal classes (and not that I mind on most days). 

But not planning gives this particular type of writing a different kind of magic, perhaps not for my audience (not that I've even worked out who you are yet or whether you even exist outside my head), but for me, as a writer of ... sorts, blogging offers something unique, not just instant publication or online interaction. 

Blogging has a kind of intangible electricity to it that runs through your fingers as you type -- similar to what I imagine being in the car with writer Jack Kerouac would feel like: driving really fast along a long, empty road without any traffic lights, pedestrian crossings or stop signs, not thinking about what we're passing or even where we're going until we come to the stop at the end. Then without even getting out of the car to explore our surroundings, we throw our half smoked cigarette out the window and keep driving or with one hurried click press 'publish post'.