Hello!
Time was when only the privileged few were educated enough to put quill to parchment, and even they were too wrapped up in passing on the word of Our Lord to worry about expressing themselves. The written word was considered far too powerful a thing to be made accessible to just any old chump, and, as though ashamed at having bitten the forbidden apple, or afraid of some grotesque punishment for their Promethean theft, scribes concentrated primarily on using their ability to copy out passages of the Bible. Today it’s unthinkable that a new communicative medium would be restricted to such a conservative use – when the internet arrived on our computers, for example, we chose instead to use it primarily to look at videos of boobies, bums, fannies and willies, and the interaction of all four in a variety of rude and pleasing ways. The equivalent would be if Brother Benedict had looked up from transcribing the book of Leviticus to see Brother Luke vacantly masturbating over a pair of newly scribbled breasts.
Perhaps I’m stating the obvious here, but in the 21st century belonging to an order of monks is no longer a prerequisite for doing a bit of writing. In fact, nowadays anyone with a keyboard and an internet provider can blurt out their thoughts, feelings and opinions to the entire world, and this is completely irrespective of their education or level of spiritual enlightenment. Yes, the internet has handed every single one of us a planet-sized loud-hailer, and we’ve not stopped screaming through them since. With a few clicks of a mouse we can anonymously discuss the merits of the latest Mission Impossible movie with complete strangers on a million different message boards, and then hurl tirades of vicious and misspelt abuse at anyone who disagrees with us. We can bash out daily online diaries and forward the link to whomever we can find, so that they can read about what we just ate for dinner and exactly what we watched on television while we did so. We can put together elaborate adverts for ourselves, complete with flattering photographs, on Facebook, or update the Earth’s population of our every experience, as it happens, on Twitter.
Just imagine what a bizarre experience it would be if people suddenly decided to communicate like this face to face – if the internet started happening in the Mitcham branch of Tesco Express, for example, you’d walk in and the first thing you’d notice is a young man pouting and gurning for the CCTV camera, listing his favourite films and asking passersby if they would be his friend. Somewhat confused by this behaviour, you’d walk further inside, only to be distracted from your shopping once again by a woman loudly narrating her every thought and movement in the third person (“Helen is considering getting Colgate for a change”, “Helen thinks Nutella is too expensive”, “Helen just scratched her left elbow”). But before you could process any of this, three people would suddenly grab you and pull you aside – the first wanting to tell you all about the time last week when they thought they’d lost their keys, the second wanting to quiz you in order to find out which Disney character you are, and the third calling you a “cnut” for not liking Inception.
The internet is often referred to in terms of being a ‘global community’, and it’s not difficult to find examples of the internet bringing people from across the world together, exchanging ideas and cultural insights in terrifically positive ways. But far more often the internet strikes me more as a cacophony of a billion voices shouting over each other into the darkness, struggling to be heard. According to a website I found via Google just now and have in no way verified, in 2010 21.4 million new websites were created, 25 billion Tweets were sent, 30 billions updates were added to Facebook and the number of blogs online rose to 152 million. It’s nuts to imagine just how much content was thoughtfully delivered or thoughtlessly spewed online by keyboard-glued hopefuls – thoughts, feelings, stories, events, memories, opinions, jokes, questions, insights…all to go completely unread by a single other person.
So why bother? Why does it seem as though the first thing so many people seem to want to do after they’ve, for example, bought a new toaster, is share the experience with the rest of humanity? Why take the time to type out your opinion of Ron Howard’s new Dan Brown adaptation on a message board if your opinion amounts to little more than “it were a bit shit”?
Maybe it is fitting that each profile page on Facebook has a ‘wall’, as perhaps the internet has essentially reduced us all to the level of cavemen, crudely sketching out the details of our everyday lives for all to see for no particular reason at all other than an instinct for expression.
But another similarly pseudo-intellectual explanation I much prefer is that the internet, along with the ever-increasing democratisation of the media, has transformed the experience of modern living into one big ‘vox pop’ section of the kind seen on the news, in which the average bloke on the street is stopped by a reporter and given the opportunity to broadcast his views, whatever they may be, on national television. The internet, with its endless opportunities for self-expression, is the equivalent of being followed around day and night by one of these reporters, who continuously jabs his mike towards your mouth and asks you endlessly what you think. As if this weren’t tempting enough a reason to start rabbiting away about whatever comes to mind, the reporter then promises to pixelate your face and disguise your voice, offering you complete anonymity. It’s flattering, aggrandising and there’s very little real recourse possible against you to threaten to ruin it. The result is that the internet is flooded with opinions and thoughts that would have otherwise gone unannounced, but are instead typed up and sent off into the world for everyone to read, no matter how ill-informed, ill-advised, irrelevant or uninteresting they are.
Welcome to my new blog everyone! I hope you enjoy it!
Drawings by Morgan Williams.
