With the advent of blogs and everyone commenting on everything, will we get to a point where we run out of commentary? Has everything been said already, albeit in a slightly different way? An old friend of mine asked this question this evening. Well, maybe not quite that question, but that general idea. When will we simply have too much information? Maybe. In the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde, a great series if you have not yet read them, there is the contention that all the book plots have been done and redone and all that is left is a sliver of original ideas. Yet people still read books. Then again, the publishing of books was never quite as accessible. Everyone wasn’t talking. How do you hear any message above that kind of din?
This is an interesting quandary and not the first time I’ve heard the argument. With thousands of blogs being indexed every month, there are ever more people looking for a voice. However, if everyone starts talking at once, eventually people drop out and one person talks. Or they pass the conch shell. Or they leave and find an audience that’s more interested in listening so that they can talk. I think we’re in a transition period and this will eventually happen with blogs. And is an influx of so many opinions such a bad thing? Eventually the dust will clear and there will be popular blogs and niche blogs and personal blogs. And even if everyone may have discussed it, each time the perspective will be a bit different.
I was discussing with another friend of mine how we choose to blogs and why we read the blogs we do. You read blogs of people you know. Whether you like them, hate them or barely remember them, that connection is what keeps you interested. It’s like getting all the gossip we want, from the source, without having to ask for it. Or you have enough in common with the writer that you feel like you know them. They are people and we crave to know about other people. Why is a novel with great character development and “human nature” so classic? Why do we follow the lives of celebrities? People are fascinated with people. And the faces behind the blogs reveal a far greater range of emotion than any of our celebrities and politicians are allowed to. This is what my friend and I discussed and I think there’s a lot of truth in it. Taking this into consideration, there will always be someone interested in reading blogs and there will always be something new to say. Even though everybody’s talking, we’re all listening.
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