Tech IT Easy

I wrote a pretty angry post yesterday. You didn’t read it, but the gist came down to that it is frustrating to blog and then not be commented on. 90% of my posts are *out loud thinking* ones, meaning that it doesn’t provide a simple answer, but is meant to start a discussion about, very possibly, how wrong I am. I’m glad it wasn’t published in its original form, though the issue remains and I am considering to drop blogging, because it’s pretty unrewarding to me on the whole.

I do have a theory about blogging though, about the internet really, taking a strategic and economical stance. From a strategic perspective, I’ve already written that the barriers to entry in this industry are extremely low. Last year or the year before, Jeremy wrote about the huge amount of blogs out there. I’m sure that number has increased.

Take that together with the problem of marmalade. Have too much of it on your shelves and you’ll hardly sell anything at all; have a select choice of items, and you’ll do well.

Translation: either don’t blog or don’t blog differently, and you’ll be safe. It’s no wonder that Techmeme was such a success, we love it when one topic is covered over and over again, because there’s only space for so many new topics in our heads.

It’s not just blogs that have to operate this way. The music industry increasingly does too. I wrote a little essay about it, which I also never published. It’s entitled “20,000 songs in your pocket.”

With those words, Steve Jobs essentially signed the death warrant of music. How special is a song, which is a work of love for many an artist, if it has to compete with 19,999 other ones? So technology has killed art, and so there remains little to be said, except to accept that fact.

Whether it’s 20,000 songs, or 1 million blogs, or 1000 blog posts, while before your wisdom may have previously been confined to a single page. Multitude eradicates individuality and the beast it produces is as yet unknown. Can we make order out of chaos, can we bring it to a coherent whole, develop a technology that brings that forward which is of value? These are the questions that should be asked… perhaps… perhaps not.

It is the natural state of humanity to bring change. Our whole lives are centred around birth, a short life, and death. During our lives, new people are born, with new and different lives, different thoughts and ideas. Every generation can and must bring about change, because they cannot do the same thing that their parents have done.

And so, perhaps, 20,000 songs in your pocket isn’t the end of art after all. 20,000 songs merely exposes us to more, more quickly, and also forces us to adapt. Either we set artificial boundaries—10 songs in your pocket, how’s that?—or we do in fact produce an AI that translates it for us all. But truly, doing that would mean that our kind of intelligence, the kind that can block out the nonsense in our lives, has become replaced.

The end… and the beginning!

I guess it was an ode to the human brain, which makes decisions that work best for it. Do I have an answer, except to perhaps quit blogging or try to beat that human brain? Not yet! If you do, feel free to leave a comment.

Have a nice weekend!
Vincent