Thought of the day:
Which is worse, having complete randoms reading your innermost thoughts, or showing highly personal writings to somebody who actually knows you?
With the advent of new media, the line between the personal and the public domain seems to get increasingly blurred. I won't bother writing too much about blogs, because they have been analysed to the death, but with new mediums like message boards, one can broadcast something like: watched Blow today, wonderful film, loved Johnny's acting - to the rest of the world.
How does this compare with more traditional communication devices? Possibly compared with print, you could say that it is uncensored, and unedited. There was no selection process involved. I could write 'Watched bolw2 2dae. so cool. johny is so cute...such a gud acter', and the same message would have been broadcast across to the world in the same manner. But maybe this second sentence could tell you more about who I was compared to the first. Would the concepts of 'fangirl', and 'teenager' come to mind, by any chance?
There are also vast differences in the reach. This seems to reflect a trend running through the course of history: that ideas are transmitted with quicker speed. High literacy rates, and increasing access to the internet has shrunk the world. Without going into the Moral Implications (TM) of this, one can see instantly that the idea gets whizzed across to anybody who can be arsed to read it, compared to a local newspaper, say, which has only so many readers. It is unlikely that you could get the Cambridge Evening Press in Wollongong, should you so desire. You could argue, though, that not everybody has access to the internet, but I should think that the number of people who have (uncensored) internet access far outnumbers the number of people a newspaper could reach.
The internet is virtually (hehe) unlimited in its content and scope (this too could be said for other media forms like film). Whatever people can be bothered to transmit digitally can be stored on some space somewhere, just because digital storage is so much easier than physical storage. Think of the number of trees that die everytime you print something on a piece of paper. I'd laugh, though, if we went into 'silicon rationing' sometime in the future, although, of course, Technology will improve such that we find more Efficient means of storing data. But more seriously, having unlimited storage space in servers (look, even film can be purely digital these days) links back to the lack of editing. If people can be bothered to write/type/create something, let it be publicly available to everybody, because the costs of doing so is negligible.
The very existence of these little pixelated dots on your computer screen as you read this probably speaks more than everything I've ever typed here.
Copyright Roux 2005. No part of this may be reproduced without prior written permission of the author.
