Andrew Sullivan, that mess of walking contradictions (Libertarian Conservative/Gay) who blogs for The Atlantic, another mess of contradictions (an ostensibly left-leaning mag that's becoming increasingly right-wing since the late Michael Kelly took over as editor in 1999) wants all of America to know how hard it is being his online avatar.

In an essay titled "Why I Blog," Sullivan spends around 5,000+ words describing his relation to the "quintessentially postmodern idiom" and the nasty, nasty commentator criticism.

Yep it's just a blow-hardy as it sounds:

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.

Again, it's hard to overrate how different this is. Writers can be sensitive, vain souls, requiring gentle nurturing from editors, and oddly susceptible to the blows delivered by reviewers. They survive, for the most part, but the thinness of their skins is legendary. Moreover, before the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I'd gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.

A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

"At its best?" Would Andrew Sullivan prefer a blogger dictatorship, where any dissent in writing is censored? Now that we have the ability to comment as instaneously as we blog, there is no going back to the previous arrangment, where editors could hide unseemly/poorly written criticism from the journalists.

Sullivan liked the Internet better before Web 2.0, before they let just any old idiot have their comment posted for the world to see (next to Sullivan's own diatribe!).

The oxymoron does have a point though: blogs are a conversation between the writers and the readers, where brevity and aggregation are more important than a long-winded essay and wordsmithing. Which begs us to wonder: why the four-page missive, Sullivan? You could have easily summed it up as "I wish I wrote for a print publication, so I wouldn't have to read what some idiot in Alabama thinks of me."

See? Short,sweet, and Twitterable.