The Bonfire of Inanities

Blah, blah, blah. Blog, blog, blog. I hate blogs. Not this one, let me make that clear. I mean the digital publication of the thoroughly uninteresting details of the perfectly generic lives of random writer wanna-bes who feel the need to inflict their every unoriginal thought, every irrelevant opinion on the rest of the world. I'm talking about online diaries.

It used to be that a diary was a personal thing. When I was a child (which, contrary to appearances, wasn't that long ago), I knew some people who still kept journals. I also knew that reading these journals, without the explicit permission of the owners, would mean hell to pay if they ever found out. It used to be that people treasured the things that made them unique, and kept them close, to share only with those nearest to their hearts.

Now, people thrust these private things on complete strangers. Where, once, we recorded our thoughts in order to be able to think them through, we now publish, in vapid and vulgar fits of vanity, for our semi-literate peers to partake and proffer their own ill-considered responses. And now, we have video blogs. Lifecasting (thanks a lot, Justin TV). Podcasts. Plurk, for Christ's sake. A whole arsenal of means to make public things which we once would have kept to ourselves. And for good reason.

The truth is that most writing is poor writing. The truth is that most thought is, shall we say, less than profound. With the blog and its multimedia cousins making it so easy for even those absurdly unqualified to be heard, we now bear witness to atrocities like the tearfully impassioned "defense of Britney" on Youtube. Good grief, what a loser that guy was. Sometimes I wish I could destroy them all, these blogs, this literary plague that has amounted to a significant dumbing-down of our everyday reading material. I wish I could burn them, like people once did to worthless pages; a bonfire, as it were, of inanities. But, here I am, blogging. Crap.