Blogging and English Civil War Newsbooks

I was reading a post by Mercurius at LP on the Blog wars and the "bitchy behaviour" therein, and one of Mercurius's musings caught my eye:

Bloggers in their behaviour and agenda seem to me to most closely resemble the pamphleteers of the 17th-19th centuries. There was no shortage of bitchery between writers back then, although most of what endures today from those pamphlets are the substantial articles, not the month-to-month snark of those old missives. What purposes, sociologically speaking, did pamphleteering fulfil then, and does blogging fulfil the same purposes today?

I have been musing about this for some time myself. Back in 2002, I did a 20,000 word honours thesis investigating newsbook (early of fore-runner of newspapers) reactions to the 1640s radical political group, the Levellers. As an observer (and sometimes semi-participant through comments at GrodsCorp) of the stoushes between Bloggers, the similarity with stoushes between royalist, parliamentarian and radical newsbooks of the 1640s is astonishing. I haven't got any exact examples on hand, but there was very much the "bitchiness" that Mercurius refers to. Newsbooks were continually having a go at one another and there were ones such as Mercurius Anti-Pragmaticus that were specifically set up to attack, for instance in the example given, Marchamont Needham's Royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus. A similar factor between the blogs and the notebooks was the lack of censorship controls both in the 1640s (censorship broke down during the war) and the internet today. In the 1640s, the number of newsbooks skyrocketed as anyone who could afford a printing press or a printer could publish one, much like a blog today with anyone having access to the internet could easily set up a blog.

Over the last couple of years, I have been thinking about writing an article about this topic and will try to do one this year. I have not written already due to factors such as laziness, writer's block, trips overseas and other projects such as my short stories, essays, my planned article on the 1497 Cornish rebel leader Michael Joseph An Gof and how he is a symbol of Cornish resistance to English cultural, political, social and economic domination of the county, and my memoir about Asperger's Syndrome and depression.

I think it might even be a topic for a PhD.