Over at Instapundit.com –, a comment by Glenn Reynolds got me thinking. He says

…people blog so that they can express themselves — to be producers, not consumers — and we see this impulse across the world of new and alternative media. But it’s not really new. Lots of musicians play music in spite of the fact that most of them won’t get rich.

In The Support Economy, Soshana Zuboff has a wonderful exploration of the difference between being a consumer and being a producer. She finds indications that consumers are second-class citizens.

But really isn’t this a bizarre distinction? We all consume. And we all produce something, even if it’s just ill-will in others. A more natural view would be to look your ratio or consumption to production. One of the reasons I blog is that is allows me to digest and produce ideas as a result of my enormous consumption of information. Otherwise, I get really fat with ideas.