I recently read about an author who seems to be on an anti-internet campaign.  The phrase “rise of the mediocre” or something similar seemed to be a central theme.  He may have read this blog as part of his research to form that conclusion.  As time goes on I agree with him more and more.

There are quite a few good blogs on this site, and there are some that we have unfortunately lost to Vox.  All the ones that I have read and enjoyed with varying degrees of consistency are fairly articulate and accurate, make good points and give readers insights into the lives, minds or beliefs of the authors.  Lately, however, I haven’t found as many interesting new blogs.  I’ve mostly found advertising sites or blogs offering mediocre advice or incomprehensible or illogical diatribes on obscure topics.  It’s been something of a disappointment, although I hardly rate myself as being the producer of a top notch quality blog.  My greatest disappointment lately has been that if and when I’ve had comments they’ve hardly had any critical content at all.  It’s as if personal preference and insults are the order of the day in place of   enlightened rational thought.  Although why I’m concerned about that is beyond me.  All in all I think, sadly, our good blogs are becoming overwhelmed by rubbish.  (And this should be of concern for environmentalists – even more moderate ones like myself - as well as the server space needed to house all this dribble would have quite a considerable carbon footprint).

Facebook also has me convinced that the world is drowning in the ordinary.  Photography more than content convinces me of this.  My parents have about 3 wedding photographs, we would have had a roll or two of film photographs taken of the family each year at most and when I got my own camera for the first time I know that I went out of my way to make each shot special.  The advent of digital photography means that we take shots of anything and everything.  I’m actually getting quite tired of trying to trawl through the endless photos of people either drunk on the weekend or making the same pose with the same friends in a slightly different location and a different dress.  I know that I have heaps of friend abroad photographing fascinating places I’ll never visit, taking shots of their children as the grow up and documenting some really special moments and people.  They’re just impossible to find amongst the rest of the stuff on there.  Actually the number of people willing to post some really ordinary or unflattering shots of themselves is astounding.

A recent episode of South Park also further convinced me of this when they were poking fun of “internet celebrities” such as the ‘leave Brittany alone’ emo kid, tron guy, the ‘Chocolate rain’ singer and various animal videos.  It’s stuff that’s mildly amusing at best.  It doesn’t really deserve more notoriety than real artistic performance by people with actual talent.  I guess seeing as it’s amusement for free I shouldn’t complain.  But I do think that the number of people going out there doing what they do online is just feeding into the same culture that produces really mediocre reality TV.  We almost expect rubbish entertainment.

The logical conclusion of all this would seem to be that we should just all stop blogging, posting photos on FB and filming ourselves failing at doing dumb ninja stunts, but it’s not.  It all represents the struggle we all have to come to grips with new media, cheaper media and global mass communications.  Other forms of media are not so freely available and as such have rigid guidelines to select what will be produced.  They’re not cheap to manufacture and they’re hard to make money on.  The internet is free.  Your blog sites, email sites and networking sites are paid for by advertising.  If you’re not worried about being compensated for your time you can put absolutely anything up there regardless of the content, grammar or value to society.  We can not have the same expectations of online content that we do of printed or recorded matter.