GAS

The last thing the world needs is yet someone else gassing away on the internet.  There are millions—more likely billions—of people doing it already, in one forum, blog, website or another.

In fact, I’ll bet that if all those gasses from all those blogs etc., were somehow magically transformed into real gasses spewed out by cars and industry and so on in the real world, we’d all have choked to death by now from lack of air.

Because if there’s one thing humans have always seemed compelled to do, it’s record events and ideas for other humans to take note of, be impressed by, laugh at, or whatever.  There’s just no stopping us.  I mean, we began the whole thing by chipping out messages in stone.  That’s no easy thing.  Granted, you generally didn’t sit down and start chipping away yourself, but what you had to say had to be important enough to you to hire somebody or get your slave to do it for you.  It wasn’t a spur of the moment kind of thing.

Then papyrus, quills, and paper came along and made it possible for more people to write down more things.  Which they did.  Or they had scribes do it.  No waiting for a mason now.

Printing presses, typewriters, ball point pens, computers.  Every time there was a technological leap making more writing by more people possible, people took advantage of it.  In droves.

And then along came cyberspace.  Social media.  Forums.  Comment and feedback pages.  No paper or ink required, much less a hammer and chisel.

Now anybody with a computer, a tablet, a phone, can write and send his or her words into the ether.  In fact, not only are people sending out words in unprecedented numbers, but the written, or typed, or digitalised word has taken on a second persona, if you will.

The words of records, research, letters, philosophy, poetry, novels, and all of the other writing that humans have increasingly undertaken over the millennia, have now been joined by another family of words and thoughts.  Who remembers the gossip sessions around the wood or oil stove in the general store?  How about the chats at the hairdresser or post office?  The gripe or fun sessions at the coffee shop or bar?

Sure, these still happen.  Well, maybe not the gatherings around the stove.  But more and more, these general, un-planned, un-considered, exchanges of random thoughts take place not physically between friends and colleagues, but in cyberspace.  The oral banality that used to slip out of existence nearly as soon as it had been uttered, now takes its place alongside all of the other things that humanity has written and is writing down.

We’ve gone from needing to choose the fewest words required to be chiselled into stone, to flinging any of our incomplete or inconsequential thoughts out into the world.  Which is why, really, the last thing the world needs right now is someone else gassing away on the internet.

Nonetheless, and with hardly a smidgen of guilt, here I am.