BlandNet

by Peter Saint-Andre

2005-03-15

Last Friday, Greg Yardley posted some provocative thoughts on the future of the Internet, positing that the desire to fit into the conversation of all with all will induce a kind of self-censorship among bloggers and other online writers, leading to a vast wasteland of bland me-too-ism. Perhaps (after all, most media and technologies become somewhat conservative over time). At that point, the regular Internet will be perceived as that boring place where people have to observe correct etiquette and polish their images for fear of offending someone somewhere. If that bland net comes to pass, I think Yardley is right that interesting people will tune out the net and turn on to something new. But that something new might just be a kind of alternet, where people don personas in which they can say what they really think. So I'm not going to worry over much about the emergence of the BlandNet quite yet, even though Yardley's piece does force a blogger to think clearly about the topics he does not speak about. How do you self-censor?


Peter Saint-Andre > Journal