Shouting into the void.

Writing on the Internet is an exercise in futility. Or rather 99.9% of the time it is. I'm not sure where i plucked the phase from but "Shouting into the void" seems pretty apt. To be honest any combination of loud talking and emptiness would work, "yelling at the dark", "screaming at the blackness", "exclaiming into the night". The point is a lot  of urgent and frantic typing gets done that fades into the almost infinite amount of space out there on the web. There are billions of them. Feverishly typed words online that will simply never be read. Not that that bothers many of those writing them, they just type more. WITH BIGGER CAPS LOCK. AND MORE BOLD TEXT. WITH EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!! as if they can overcome the lack of notice with sheer volume and break through. The Internet is crammed full of it and 99.9% of it isn't worth reading, mediocrity is mediocre for a reason. There is just so much of it. 



But the existence of even the rubbish stuff alone is mildly exciting. Spend enough time on the Internet and soon enough you begin to sense a little bit of its sheer vastness. During your daily browsing take the time to stop and realise that your chain of random curiosities (What is the capital city of Canada? How much cake does it take to choke an Elephant? Why oh god why did the 80s happen? you know, the usual) has led you somewhere that might feel out of the way, one of the many backwaters of the online world. These places are off the beaten track of the likes of google, Bing or any other tool we used to filter and make sense of the mind-scrambling amount of data out there on the web and break it neatly into bite-sized chunks of amusing cats and personal abuse (see; YouTube comments section). 

These places excite me because they feel out of the way, tucked just out of view where only maybe a few people might have seen them or maybe no-one has bothered to look at them for year. They can sometimes be very personal, blogs with pictures of loved ones, a site with pictures of holidays with Friend. They feel like stumbling unexpectedly into someones bedroom or realising the book you found was someones diary who you have never heard of and will most likely  never meet. They convey the depth and breath of human experience and show us something of the true nature of the web. The void is not empty, its full and getting fuller all the time. This is why it is so very hard to be heard above this torrent of just... stuff. It's humbling really, thinking about how what you see is just 10000000th of what there really is out there since as more people get online, the online world begins to reflect the worlds of all those billions of people.

The Internet sort of hits you like that sometimes. With these backwaters you can guess at it's unimaginably massive structure from the cup-cake sized slice you can see for yourself (Kudos for the reference). It's kind of like plugging the whole world into your head via an Ethernet cable and seeing yourself in relationship to it. But I'm getting off track here.

To Paraphrase a great book; The Internet is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the stairs to the fridge , but that's just peanuts to The Internet. YouTube, Google, Amazon compared to the whole are just tiny dots upon tiny dots floating in the ether of cyberspace*. So you can excuse me for doubting the real effectiveness of the place for ordinary people to truly be heard. 

A Forlorn and Empty Blog **Crickets** ....... **Tumbleweed**

Phew. That was a lot to go through to inform you that I'm a little skeptical about the whole idea of the "Blog-o-sphere" and its impact. But i guess it was all necessary to see where i was coming from. This isn't a cynical article about how shit most of the Internet is, how you might as well end it all now because no one cares about what you have to say, you were adopted and your parents and the dog secretly hate you. Not at all. I'm not an embittered person venting from a dark room (i have a light on for one). The Internet is just fucking HUGE. 


And this leads me to where you are, in (for now) one of the many backwaters of the Internet listening to me attempt to shout into  the void. And maybe, just maybe if I'm lucky it will whisper back. 


John Sweeney is off to re-read Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy for the 100th time