it’s all been done (woo-hoo-hoo!)

In case you didn’t get it, that was a reference to a song by the Barenaked Ladies, used as the intro music to the animated show Baby Blues. Now watch as zemzelett attempts to embed a YouTube video to show you people what you’re missing:

Did it work? Phooey. Anyway… Finicky browser issues aside, zemzelett just wanted to use the song as a segue for his topic (prepare for zemzelett’s mastery of the obvious here)–that is, how bloggers like himself clog the Internet not only with pointless whine-fests and unsupported facts, but also repetitive information. Simply put, with the sheer number of bloggers, there’s bound to be several hundred of them with the exact same opinion about the same topics. Ultimately, bloggers end up echoing each other (though not necessarily on purpose).

The thing is, what may be new information to one person could be old news to another, and people have no way to tell if someone else already said what they wanted to say. (What?) A typical blogger then tries to repackage this information in a different, more interesting matter, only to find that a thousand other bloggers on the opposite hemisphere already did the exact same thing. The blogger in question ends up parroting information already put out by others no matter what he does. He then feels that his contribution to the world’s information exchange is moot and that his ideas and his existence are therefore redundant, thus beginning an self-destructive downward spiral into madness… or so I’ve heard.

The redundancy of information used to take centuries. For example: Europeans came up with the concept of pierogi, claiming that it was an unprecedented and revolutionary way to eat food, only to find out that the Chinese came up with dumplings centuries beforehand. Nowadays, with the advent of the Internet and (ugh) New Media, a revolutionary idea can become cliché in minutes. (I suppose parodies of the “Leave Britney Alone” video would be funny the first couple of times, until a dozen other imitators come up with their own versions. You can only stand the “Leave Britney Alone” guy being done in a chipmunk voice with a Hampton the Hampster soundtrack so many times before you lose it. o_o A blogger is then forced to do research to see if someone else already came up with the same idea, but one can only have so much time for that. And personally, I suck at research.

Nobody is at fault in the pierogi scenario, because they came up with the idea independently of each other. With the Internet, however, bloggers are expected to know what ideas are already in circulation, thus adding pressure to come up with something original. That’s all well and good, but people can only come up with original material (or original ways of presenting material) so many times before the possibilities dry up.

In the end, the Internet has effectively shortened the lifespan of all ideas by distributing them so quickly that they become old and worn-out in no time. The Internet also trivializes great ideas by making it easy for countless imitators to come up with their own, supposedly-original-but-not-really versions. In short, the Internet has sucked the well of original ideas dry. And for those who believe in the boundless creativity of the human mind… seriously, let’s not be delusional and accept the limits of our imagination. We’re only human, by gum!

Boy howdy, I’ll be busy preparing for BCIT’s Industry Night, so you might get lucky and not hear from me for a week or so. On the other hand, I’ll probably be posting tons of fun new stuff on DeviantArt (click the link on the right), so please check it out every so often during the next two weeks. And don’t mind me if I sound bitter right now. I intend to resolve my affaire de coeur at the final day of reckoning (by which I mean Friday, the last day of my New Media program). “You were wrong, I was right; you said goodbye, I said good night!”