Giving everyone a voice is great – except when it isn’t
The internet has enabled so much more people than before to speak out. This is one of its great achievements.
Not everyone may have an audience. But at least it ‘s now theoretically possible for ever more people around the world to be heard. Thankfully, this does not depend on whether an intelligentsia, or a ruling class considers an individual’s voice ‘worthy’ or not.
There is a distinct problem, though: Too much writing on the internet is deemed to be ‘great‘ or ‘interesting‘. I am as guilty of this as the next guy.
But not everything is great. Giving everyone the means to publish whatever they want leads to an explosion of superficial thinking. I think people basically tend to mimic the desires of others and they tend to cluster around popular opinions.
And nearly everyone falls prey to overestimating their own knowledge and insight. You see lots of articles and comments on stuff people are obviously not qualified to comment on. Yet they think they are qualified to have an opinion and criticize others. Again, I am as guilty of this as anyone.
I’m trying to get better at stiffling that impulse and only write about things I truly understand.
Don’t get me wrong: I think the internet has achieved wonderful things. We have to advance our current state of technology to help us deal with the ever growing amount of information. We need to filter stuff we, individually, consider to be superfluous, unqualified writing or plain noise. And this hasn’t happened yet and we’re still far from being good enough at it.
Until then, I see us drowning in a sea of information of – at best – mixed quality.
