Ive been thinking a lot lately.
Not about anything in particular – just all kinds of stuff. Truth be told, I was thinking about what I wanted to blog about. And it was while thinking about this that I started to think about original thought.
Obviously i’m not the first person to have an original thought about original thought, but it got me to thinking, and it started a conversation with a co-worker about the amount of rehashed content on the internet. What we talked about was that these days – in the same way major News publishers and TV networks (for the most part) carry the same news, the same story, the same stock footage – our favourite websites, once our favourites because they carried the quirky, the innovative, and the sharp, are themselves becomining homogenised.
It’s not uncommon for each of my 10 favourite RSS feeds from these sites to carry the same content. One links to one, the other links to the link of one… and so on and so forth.
As Jess Jervis says in the episode of Futurama I just happened to watch : “The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people’s ideas. We’ve done nothing wrong!”
Which is a very true statement. I mean, that’s the beauty of the internet – that we can all share each others ideas, read them, link to them, create this awesome social network of interconnected thought processes… but I guess what I am lamenting is that even though the internet has reached its’ 100 millionth website, I feel like we are all (by degrees) talking abut the same stuff.
It might be just me, who knows. Maybe I just need to search a little harder, think a little longer… or not worry too much about it. I mean, without the support of people linking to sites, sharing info etc… who would bother putting effort in to creating open source blogs… but then again, without the generic blogs – perhaps the mere effort in making your own custom site would induce more individual thought… but then again, if EVERYONE had to make their own sites, standards might not be embraced, the internet might not be as rich, the open source community not as strong… etc, etc.
So I ponder. And I hope that on the horizon I’ll see the new Boing Boing (eg) and it will NOT just be a list of links from the old Boing Boing.
In the mean time… check this out!