Writes Daniel Henninger in the WSJ about blogs:

I don’t think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don’t have to. They’ve got the Web. Now they can share.

The context is the Kevin Ray Underwood case–the killer (and, yes, cannibal) who also had a blog.

However, I think Henninger is missing something more fundamental, of which blogs are only a manifestation: advances in technology in general have contributed to coarseness of speech and less inhibitions in the public sphere, as we are able to share more and more with one another.

And it started with the printing press (if not the written word itself) and it just accelerates along. Blogs (really, more to the point, the ability to instantly publish information to the internet) are simply a manifestation of that situation.

And to give Henninger credit, he does cite some other forms of tech.

However, the point of the matter is that crude language, dark thoughts and all manner of other unpleasantries about the human race are hardly new–it is just now far easier to share.

As he points out: there are highly intelligent blogs, and then there’s MySpace. However, isn’t that just a reflection of humanity itself? There are only so many truly intellectual people running around out there interesting in deep discourse. However, the number of people willing to drop f-bombs and chat about the naughtier bits of life are legion. (Although I would note, there aren’t that many cannibals out there, either).

The internet simply makes it more difficult to ignore that fact.