Internet scholars have not been able to agree on who was the world’s first blogger. They can’t get an answer because they’re asking the wrong question.

 

The first blogger wasn’t even on the Internet. He was on TV. His name was Doogie Howser, M.D.

 

For those of you who don’t know, Doogie Howser was a boy prodigy who graduated medical school at age 16 and entered residency at the same hospital his doctor father worked at. Still living at home, he talked his father into buying him a home computer. One of those Commodore 64’s or something. An ancient beast of a computer.

 

The father agreed to his son’s request on one condition: Doogie would have to keep a daily journal on his computer, discussing his thoughts, feelings, and life lessons for the day.

 

And so, at the end of every episode, Doogie sat down at the computer and the audience read along as he entered his journal entry. Like so, the blog was created.

 

The blog was an effective way to relate to the audience the show’s conclusion. This was an era of Full House, who ended its shows with similar lessons, but in the far cheesier manner of a parental lecture. The Full House children were exactly that, children, but Doogie was a teenager, and a doctor at that. He couldn’t have his father come in and tell him what lessons he had to have learned. Teenagers have to learn these things on their own.

Adults have to learn these lessons on their own.

 

And that’s why I believe the blogosphere has proven so effective in the modern world. Now, there are specialty blogs that give you highly detailed information on certain topics. And there are political blogs that give running commentaries on the state of our democracy. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about the blogs where someone has a bad day, writes about it, and resolves it with a lesson. Those are the real blogs we’re talking about.

 

In retrospect Doogie Howser makes the perfect blog messiah. He was preternaturally talented (super genius, boy M.D.), but his emotional maturity hadn’t caught up to him yet. Doogie was still figuring things out in life, because no matter how smart a sixteen year-old gets, he’s still a sixteen year-old. And if you look up sixteen year-old in the dictionary, there’s a picture of an idiot.

 

In a sense, everybody that blogs is a Doogie Howser. No, we’re not all that smart (or not even that smart at all), but we all have something that makes us think all day long, that we sometimes can’t figure out despite ourselves, and then we share these thoughts on our little computers, typing away for others to read along.

 

                                    (some of the ideas discussed in this article are further explored in Jerry Springer: Man or Messiah?)