Through A Canvas Digitally

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Where have all the record stores gone?

The Web is full of "user generated nonsense" - is in a nutshell one of the conclusions of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen.

Also more conclusions are that the second coming of the Web will destroy our moral fibre, it will be the downfall of organized Man as we know it, and completely drive every record store in the world out of business.

The author, while taking up this argument on behalf of the well-read, qualified, learned and wise expert is going up against a wall of monumental proportions. For, as is known but is difficult to quantify in terms of actual numbers, for every qualified "creator" of content in this world there are many more, much and many many times more, "consumer as creator" types (such like me and the upwards of 95% of the bloggers out there in the blogosphere) churning out content - be it the written word, the moving image, voice, stills etc. etc. They are creating, editing, moderating, ranking, promoting, eliminating, blacklisting with an energy not seen before. The Wikipedias, the YouTubes, the MySpaces and others like them stand grand testimony to the fact.

I however, enjoyed this read, as I went through chapter after chapter of the rant enjoying with some glee the passion with which the fair name of the Internet Culture was being sullied. It is, in a way thought provoking, for indeed there must be some acknowledgement of the years of effort that has gone into the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom and the subsequent application of that to a creation, any creation, that the learned and the qualified of this world come up with. If you come to think of it, that can continue - where is the need for all this opposition. Its not as if a learned opinion is being denied a place on the Web. It is merely being asked to co-exist with all the other "drivel" out there. Well, the rules for getting your opinion a place in the sun in terms of showing up high in the search engines and getting visibility are the same as for anybody else - so that way its a fair fight. So, I say, why complain - its just that the playing field has just gotten a lot bigger - a lot LOT BIGGER - and is visible to a lot more people than ever before.

There is however merit in what the author says about all this leading to a tremendous waste of time - a very precious commodity in today's world - I fully agree with this. What is needed is a means to be able to retrieve relevant and useful information. If by some means, this can be achieved, where the search engine can return useful, qualified content as opposed to other user-generated rubbish, it could very well turn out to be the next killer app. But who/what decides what is useful and relevant and what is not? I guess thats the first part of the puzzle that needs to be solved before moving onto the next.

Me The Writer

So given that I am one of the infinite monkeys, with my own version of one of the infinite typewriters, I stand as much of a chance as the next one of producing that masterpiece. Thats the beauty of this flattened out socially networked consumer the creator among other things situation that we find ourselves firmly in the center of. I can, and I will, say what I have to say, without fear of being stopped from saying what I want by some pompous editing entity stuffing his face with "acceptable" work from his or her equally pompous journalistic staff who have schooled themselves in this glorious art spending ages in the trenches refining their skills and honing it to perfection. I very simply can, and will, say "stuff it" to pompous editor who happens to stand in my way and go ahead and say what I want. And so can you. And the rest of the world. The Blog is a wonderful space to be in! To blog is to free yourself, to blog is to purify yourself, to blog is to - well, discover the "true" yourself. Years of this you can and this you cant get washed away like so much dirt dissolving under the onslaught of a thousand showers falling from the suddenly opened up heavens. It very simply is a good feeling. And so to all the learned folk across the room, who once had the privilege of wielding the golden pen - "stuff it". For now, I too, have not only the pen, but the paper, the attention, and above all, the sanction to say what I want to say, when and how included!

Here's to my masterpiece!!

The infinite monkey theorem

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, in his 1928 book,The Nature of the Physical World, proposed the infinite monkey theorem which suggests that if you were to give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later, someone will eventually produce a masterpiece. Given the rapid proliferation of bloggers out there in the blogosphere and the rate at which blogs are being created and posted on, (and not saying that theres a whole bunch of monkeys out there), it follows that the number of masterpieces that will now tumble out of the blogosphere should exponentially rise. How then do we harness all this into well organized buckets - one for masterpieces and one for the other random junk. If someone can find an answer to that (and given all that frenetic typing out there the answer should soon be leaping out and biting someone on the nose pretty soon....)we should soon have organized access to the collected masterpieces of the brave new human race.

On a clear day....

Openness, Peering, Sharing and Going Global. Mass Collaboration, global platforms, harnessing the collective, ideas of the masses, wikis, social networks, blogs, the empowered me's and you's, it all adds up to one big happy family.

There is power in opening up to the world. And letting it go to work for you. It is them, helping you help them, which in turn helps you more, which then...you get the point.

The world once was a huge place - and on a clear day you could see forever. It still is a huge place, only now you can see forever at any given time, from any given place, no matter what the condition of the weather is. And helping you do so is them who got helped by you in the first place when they had stopped by to help you...etc..etc..etc.