The Thousand Yard Stare

Is it a slow “internet day”? Or does it just seem like it?

It’s not “slow”, it’s just that you’ve already consumed the contents of the internet that you’re interested in. Or at least, original content.

Not so much for my own blog – you can see that I’ve come up with posts and posts of my very own un-original content. I speak of the internet in general.

Some days I wake up and check out my news reader and there’s nothing new. “Nothing new!”, I exclaim, while chomping at my pipe and stamping my feet with a few “Balderdash!” and “Simply Rubbish!” thrown in for good measure.

No new content.

To me that’s kind of why the internet becomes an addiction – you’re not actually addicted to the internet, you’re actually just addicted to new content.

I suspect that’s why the US government is encouraging people to step away from their computers. Not so much that they want people to be outside and healthy (not to mention productive), but actually so that people will do things that enable them to create new content for the internet.

What happens when the internet runs out of content? That’s a great question. First, people dig deeper and harder to find content they can recycle. This does produce a lot of nostalgic and cool things, but then that content gets spread so far and fast quickly (due to desperation of the content-hungry masses), that it quickly becomes boring. I’m looking in your direction Tumblr.

We’re already at the saturation point where content has been recycled so thoroughly that the web landscape is littered with websites so devoid of content that it takes an experienced eye but nanoseconds to recognize and click away.

Unfortunately, blog posts decrying the general lack of original content on the internet abound and I’ve done nothing more than add to the digital detritus clogging our fine nation’s bandwidth.

My work is done here.