Pat here:
According to caslon.com , there were 184 million blogs in March 2008. If the bombardment of people telling me about their new blogs is any indication, that number has probably doubled by 2009. No one knows how many of those blogs are active, or if anyone is reading them, although statistics show 77.7 million people read blogs in the US, alone. Or maybe 94 million, depending on your source. No one really knows, but the numbers are staggering.
And now there is Twitter, which in March 2008 was producing 3 million Tweets a day, and I’m figuring that’s probably tripled over this past year. If you want to figure out trendspotter predictions (I can’t even figure out the visuals), the question now is whether we’ve reached the peak and are about to topple over, or if the entire internet will simply explode with an overload of trivia.
I know everyone loves new toys, but haven’t we just about reached the limits of static noise in our
lives yet? How much of this “news” has any bearing on anything, much less reality? I scarcely have time to read our wenches blog—and I enjoy the sharing of information here—much less keep up with everyone else’s, plus write my own. Yet when I have the opportunity, I’ve found some valuable nuggets on blogs I’ve been directed to, and seen news of layoffs in NYC shortly after the laid off people were notified. So I know there’s tons of immediately useful info out there, but how does one find the time to sift through the chatter?
And will someone please explain Twitter to me? Our own Sherrie has been on top of Twitter since its inception, but the idea of my mailbox filling with one-liners from total strangers makes me wish for a quiet cave in the Sierra Madres.
Has the information age gone too far? Up until recently, I’ve been thinking the internet would soon become our TV/newspaper/bookstore, but now I’m wondering if cyberspace hasn’t become a grunting time hog destroying civilization as we know it. Okay, maybe my imagination is a little overactive. Is there any hope for someone whose head is about to explode?