‘Tis a melancholy experience for anyone who browses through this great medium, to see so much content of low and dubious quality, so much wasted time and energy, so much gaming and spamming and jockeying for attention.
A once powerful conduit of ideas and insight, a meeting place of the world's sharpest minds tackling the world’s greatest challenges, where the towering brands of the yesteryear – the Amazons, Yahoos, and Googles – formerly upheld the classical values of beauty, goodness, and truth, but now find themselves overrun and overburdened by their multitudinous offspring.
It’s a joke... It only takes minutes to start a blog and multiply the web’s cluttered and disorganized surplus of information, dumping out post after post of unnecessary verbiage, overflowing the digital latrines of Silicon Valley, sloshing its way around the world through the grimy gutters of Technorati and Bloglines. Daily – twice, thrice, or even twenty times daily – these self-absorbed opinion mongers and dilettantes thrust ever increasing doses of amateur pseudoknowledge into the publick domain.
And why do they do it? What are their motives? Is it some kind of conspiracy? I suppose these vermin-like strivers believe that some of their ideas and opinions might actually be interesting or useful to the rest of us. I suppose they all see themselves as some kind of exception: "... but my ideas are actually pretty good; if only they could be heard." Most of them probably begin with innocent enough intentions – curiosity perhaps – without considering what kind of slope they’re heading down.
I had to know why. My inquisitive and adventurous impulses soon overcame my more conventional habituations. So I decided to try it. Besides, some of my own ideas and opinions are actually pretty good, and may be quite interesting and useful to others; I just hadn’t had many opportunities to voice them. Now this is it. And the rest of the story – my foray into the Great Conversation – tells itself; it can be read between the lines of my past, present, and future posts.
That seems like a fine way to end, but I feel like I still have a bit more to say on the issue, and since I’ve not much else to do at the moment, let me tell you some more about my personal thoughts and experiences.
Honestly, I haven’t had very much success with the whole blog thing. One might account for this dismal result by my ambivalent attitude: remember my antipathy towards all of the gaming and selling and linkmanship that goes occurs over the web?
Nevertheless, a little feedback wouldn’t hurt. When I googled "blog advice" I discovered what a great plethora of information there is on the subject. That ultimately led me to this post by Seth Godin, who is probably the most overrated blogger on the web, and maybe the most overrated person in the entire world. But he knows a lot about marketing – he’s probably the most insightful and entertaining expert on the subject – especially on how to market a successful blog, so I read the post carefully and took notes.
Many of Godin’s points are very good – "write about blogging," "learn enough to become the expert in your field," "be patient," and "answer your email" – but then there are quite a few obvious contradictions. First he says to write short posts, then he says to write long ones; first he says to be timely and topical, then he says to be timeless; first he says you should appeal to a majority, then he says go for an "obsessed minority"; first he says to "write about a never-ending parade of topics," then he says to "write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive."
Godin obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the kind of person who makes things even more confusing for the rest of us. Experts should be "one-handed," as a past U.S. president said about his economic advisors: don’t give us answers that say something "on one hand," but "then on the other..." People must never have to do their own thinking. Give us straight answers, with no ambiguity or contradiction, in perfect black and white technicolour.
And the stupidest thing that Godin recommends is to "write nearly libellous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog." I would never even consider doing such a thing. It's beyond imaginable; it's totally counterintuitive. It makes me wonder about the man’s character; it makes me wonder whether perhaps the world’s most deservedly renowned marketing guru, Seth Godin, is on drugs. I’m just putting that out there.
Something else to consider is a link that Godin provides in his introduction, to some old pamphlet written by a guy named Jonathan Swift back in 1729. It’s called A Modest Proposal, and (I don’t want to go into the details, but) it recommends dealing with the problems of Irish poverty and hunger – not to mention the "melancholy" sight of it all – by more or less boiling and eating the poorest children in the country. I think that would have been a terrible idea. Shame on Jonathan Swift, and shame on Seth Godin for putting a link to it on his blog, which is highly informative and entertaining. Visit sethgodin.typepad.com.
What was he trying to tell us? And more importantly, how could anyone let such unconventional ideas be published in the first place, and then why are they still around, hundreds of years later?
My own personal opinion – and this takes us back to the problem with which I began – is that the World Wide Web is an opportunity to finally suppress all of these different ideas and opinions. It might seem quite the opposite; it might seem that the web empowers everybody to appreciate life from their own personal perspective, so that eventually each person might develop their own philosophy and worldview, creating a lifestory that interacts and mingles 'harmoniously' with the views and stories of everyone else, seeking new challenges, being adventurous, testing conventions and assumptions, and continually looking for ways to learn and grow more effectively.
But I don’t believe this will necessarily happen on its own; only human meddling and striving could give the movement enough force to overcome the opposite tendency – our "conventional habituations," the impulse to conform.
The many connections, opportunities, and challenges provided by the web don’t just have the potential to make us more self-reliant and personally responsible; they also carry the potential to make us more uniform. If we keep going this way, then the challenges I outlined at the top – the irrepressible and uncontrollable flood of information and ideas coming through the web – will be stopped dead.
But this too is something that won’t necessarily happen on its own; this too can only happen through human meddling and striving – to overcome our "inquisitive and adventurous impulses."
If this is something we really want to accomplish, I think we need to recognize that it will be a very long term project, perhaps exceeding our own lifetimes. But look at the great result: the children of the future will live obediently in a world of strict authoritarian control, with no margin for such frivolous things as "creative freedom."
Let us also admit that this will be far too broad a task to be done with any kind of overt or head-on force. Large-scale communism and other authoritarian experiments of the twentieth century have demonstrated this much; we should learn from their mistakes. People won’t conform if they know they are powerless, but if we can somehow trick everybody into mistakenly believing that they have creative freedom...
Here is my modest proposal. We should begin by designing systems that will efficiently determine what are already the most popular ideas, activities, interests, etc. Let’s call this Phase 1.0. The point here is that we’ll have a much better chance of tricking people into conformity if we find out what most of them already like. In this early phase, we also want to begin conditioning people to incorporate these systems into their everyday lives.
When the ‘measurement’ systems of Phase 1.0 have been refined, then we can begin designing the ‘management’ systems of Phase 2.0. The aim of this phase is to direct people’s activities and condition their habits and tastes. This means rewarding people who enjoy and engage in things that are already the most popular, and doing it in a way that makes them feel empowered.
I think the most effective way to do this is to encourage more and more people to become content producers and providers – without necessarily having any knowledge or skills, nor much interest in improving the knowledge and skills they already have. The kind of people we want to make productive should not have any aspirations as to personal growth, or improving the originality or difficulty of their work; they should be mainly concerned with popularity and some of the more trivial rewards which that entails.
There will always be a few aspiring radicals – creative, inquiring, and adventurous types – who will try to question assumptions and challenge conventions, but I think the overwhelmingness of a highly motivated and organized majority might eventually push such people too far out into the periphery to be of much concern.
I’m not really sure what will happen next, but I think with enough momentum, the accomplishments of Phases 1.0 and 2.0 might be enough to carry us towards a perfect authoritarian uniformity, where people can finally live in a world of ordered and ideal ignorance, where children will be freed from the burdens of creative freedom, and even adults will never be compelled to develop their own competence and knowledge.
There is only one thing that might prevent that from happening: people might somehow learn how to use the systems from Phases 1.0 and 2.0, to take advantage of them as creative resources, not for the sake of popularity and immediate reward, but rather to learn even more, even better. If people learn to think and create for themselves, sharing real understanding and actual control, then our deterministic destiny might be foiled.
Fortunately, that’s an even more challenging task, requiring long-term investment, with continual risk-taking and evaluation. It also faces a basic paradox: how can individuals unify their efforts against uniformity?
These are just a few modest suggestions that I'm putting out for discussion. I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work.
The End.
