Media

After wading through thousands of unread emails on my laptop with a signal to noise ratio of around 1 to 3,000, I couldn't help but ponder who was sending me what and what I wasn't reading - and why.

Granted, my lifestyle has changed. What most people consider to be 'new technology' seems to be a boring reiteration of the last 22 years of 'new technology' with the exception of the Internet. Because of that, and because I have grown so bored with the same old ideas being rehashed (a list would be insanely long), I don't read messages as often as I used to. If I were egocentric, I would say that it is because I have grown beyond the well intended scribblings and commentaries on the Internet about everything from electrical engineering to social media abstractions. And yet, too, it would seem egocentric to write that everyone else is at such a boring level of interest. Perhaps it would be more appropriate, honest and less egocentric to write that I have become jaded by the constant barrage of 'new and exciting' technologies, ideas and even humor that others feel the need to bestow upon the collective. Here I am, blogging, and I must wonder even at the worth of what I write.

Would that more people wondered at the worth of what they write.

We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in. - William Saroyan, My Name Is Aram, 1940.

Written in front of the Canadian Parliament on the 6th of April, 2008

As I walk past the Parliament building, I watch a Serbian/Kosovo protest that declared an artificial border had been created by the United States and professional public relations firms. That some combatants were herded off to a camp to have their organs harvested. Cameras abounded. Reporters tripped over themselves and each other.

There's a familiar story about a mouse hitting a button, maybe red, to get dosed with cocaine. It does so, consistently, in preference to food and sex.

I prefer to think of the button as being a mouse button. And instead of cocaine, there's the Internet. Some mice have a simple mouse manufactured by an elitist fruit company, but the vast majority of mice have a Swiss knife of a mouse. It's got a minimum of 3 buttons, and one of them scrolls content up and down on a receptacle that, no matter how large, always seems too small. In fact, if there was a way to crawl into the receptacle I imagine the problem with these mice would be short-lived.

But that's the Internet. Publishers are driven through by the number of clicks their content gets and - sometimes - even the quality of the clicks if that makes any sense. Thus, publishers typically cut their content into smaller pieces so that the mice have to click through more links to get their doses of content. Each click is some revenue for the publisher. Click. Click. Click. And the majority of the mice, even hearing the urban legend of how they are just revenue streams for publishers, continue to click no matter the quality or quantity of the content. Click. Click. Click.