At 1,200 words it’s a long goodbye, but Dish founder Andrew Sullivan has earned that, surely. Even if Sullivan must begin his goodbye by acknowledging that being “upfront” with readers on his blog “sometimes means grotesque over-sharing; sometimes it means I write imprudent arguments I have to withdraw.” (For more about those withdrawals, visit Mark Ames at PandoDaily.) But hey, a lot of public figures never withdraw anything. And now Andrew Sullivan is withdrawing himself from the blogosphere. Sullivan was one of the seminal bloggers–an early adopter who grew such a large audience he was able to raise money from the directly to fund his operation.
Sullivan has lots of reasons for going dark, but this one strikes at the heart of a larger change society is wrestling with. Sullivan writes: “I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms.” Can we do that now? Or is it too late?
