I once got myself into terrible trouble. (well more than once really but that is beside the point) I was working for a government department, and email was new. Many of my departmental colleagues scattered around the state were taking their new found mode of communication out for a spin to see what this new technology could do. All of a sudden I had to spend a couple of hours to clear my inbox of ads for cars, random thoughts and every now and again confessions of some, usually sexual indiscretion. The latter of these occurred because people had left their profile logged on and others hijacked it to send crass emails. I got over receiving these messages pretty quickly, and did not know what to do about it. So if you cannot beat them join them.
I, quite ironically, sent a message to everyone in the department to leave me out of their time wasting emails. Boy I got response from that one! About half congratulating me, and half condemning me for trying to clamp down on free speech or just being a kill joy. But here is my first point. Email, and present day blogging, is an incredibly efficient way to communicate. Almost instaneous, widelyl accessible and pretty cheap. However with each new junk email or blog its effectiveness decreases. This is because with so much information out there we just don't know what to make of it. Is this worth my time? Is it true? Is it worthwhile? In "Ye Olden Day" if you had a thought that you wanted people to know about, you needed someone with money (a publisher, printer etc) to agree it was worthwhile distributing. They would put up the cash and let you tell everyone. Mind you this was no guarantee what you had to say was true, just that it was not a complete waste of time! With the advent of email and blogging this "nonsense filter" has been removed. Anyone, even this author could present any old thought to an unsuspecting, and uninterested world with their random thoughts.
It is with this trepidation that I am blogging. I fear I might just be adding to the multitude of uselss thoughts that clog up the internet. But maybe, just maybe, my thoughts, sermons and research will be part of that small part of the E world that is actually useful. Maybe my line between irony and hypocrisy in this matter will be the content's usefulness. I hope that you might like and learn from this blog, but if not, sorry, I am only trying to be ironic.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The most recent economist magazine confirms my theory, and I quote "everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 millions exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful is difficult enough. ANalysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still.
ReplyDelete