Bright Activity

It’s an unusual day when you don’t browse the Internet and find something new and interesting. So many people are now creating content in the online medium that it is virtually impossible to find everything that is being said. For a brief moment somewhere in the 1990s it was possible for everyone to read every new article being published online, but those days are long past. Now we are just travelers through a vast sea of faceless voices. It’s so sad.

Few people have stopped to think about the effect of blogging on the reader but as someone who reads blogs you undoubtedly find yourself tugged in many different directions. Reading blogs takes up your time, makes you think about things, inspires you to take new action, depresses you into doing nothing, or just bores/amuses you.

Blogs have supplanted the traditional web directory format for finding new content on the Web. We would rather read about new articles from a blogger’s perspective than actually accept an editorial review by a professional Web directory administrator. It is no longer necessary for other people to protect us from the content out there.

How did we reach this point, and where was the boundary between “we need help with blogs” and “now everyone can blog”? There are some pretty serious efforts to introduce blogging to all levels of society but we have made the perilous mistake of entrusting our online time to random strangers. Are we truly utilizing that time well?

Perhaps one day the pendulum will swing back toward some sort of editorial review, where professional vetters suggest to us what may or may not be suitable or compelling enough for us to read. After all, our time is valuable. Surely you have read that on a blog somewhere.