Why Blog? (Would Goebbels have blogged?)

Jim West, a well-known Biblical Studies blogger, asks "Why blog?", wondering specifically as to why blogging is so prevelant among biblical scholars and theologians.
Jim sees it as possibly a seizing of an opportunity to share thoughts with a wide audience by scholars who might otherwise be doomed to obscurity. And importantly, blogging provides an audience not only now but also offers to record their thoughts for a future one. So blogging might be a sort of striving for immortality.
It all seems eminently true.

The question, though, led me to ask another, age old question: Why do we communicate in the first place?
Coincidentally, later in the day I found something on the web that reminded me of this second question. A portion of a speech by none other than (ahem...) Joseph Goebbels. (Yeah, that Joseph Goebbels.)

"An idea always lives in individuals. It seeks an individual to transmit its great intellectual force. It becomes alive in a brain, and seeks escape through the mouth. The idea is preached by individuals, individuals who will never be satisfied to have the knowledge remain theirs alone. You know that from experience. When one knows something one does not keep it hidden like a buried treasure, rather one seeks to tell others. One looks for people who should know it. One feels that everyone else should know to, for one feels alone when no one else knows. For example, if I see a beautiful painting in an art gallery, I have the need to tell others. I meet a good friend and say to him: "I have found a wonderful picture. I have to show it to you." The same is true of ideas. If an idea lives in an individual, he has the urge to tell others. There is some mysterious force in us that drives us to tell others. The greater and simpler the idea is, the more it relates to daily life, the more one has the desire to tell everyone about it."

The actual webpage that mentioned this is here. (The entire text of this speech can be found here. And I was originally pointed there from boingboing.) This quote was a bit tangential to the main story about the recordings by Charlie and His Orchestra, a Nazi big band assembled by Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

This urge to tell others, as if an idea itself has a desire to spread is interesting.