I have something to say, would you be interested?
People have been writing and generating ideas for more than a millennium. Recently, the number of words that are written and available for public consumption each year, thanks to the internet, however, has risen beyond an exponential growth. It is hard to imagine that all those words that are now written each day, particularly in blogs, are original ideas. Most of the writing could be recycling of older concepts, perhaps, dressed in different clothes.
The content matter of blog posts and assessing their originality, however, can also be looked in a different way.
Even if every blog post may not contain an entirely new idea, what matters more in the age of the internet is that a recently uploaded post flashes in the sky as a new star and has potential for being noticed by a segment of users. The event is like the sudden emergence of a supernova; it is the light from an exploding star that gets noticed in the night sky by many who happen to be looking at the right part of the sky.
Billions of users on the internet are looking at the content through their own telescopic screen. Among the vast universe of the internet, content we keep up with is only a narrow slice of the sky. We are only aware of what appears and disappears within our narrow field of view.
What part of the sky we look at depends on our interest, hobbies, the evolution of our internet habits, and sometimes, our desire to learn something new. If a blog flashes in the part of the sky we generally look at, it is likely to get noticed by us.
The contemporary nature of any writing, even rehashing of an old idea, just does that, and because there are so many internet users, what we write still matters.
Blog posts may not have something entirely new to say but the freshness of words, makes it novel. After all, most of us do not go around reading Spinoza ourselves. We read about his ideas through someone else’s words.
And so, though each blog post may not have something profoundly original to say, it could still be of interest to many.
If the words flash through the right part of the internet sky that I look at, I am interested in what you have to say.
Cheers and thanks for reading.
