When I started this blog I (must have) had a number of reasons. Nowadays, I can't quite recall any of them. Surely, if I try hard I may come up with a couple of new ones but something tells me it would be quite pointless. Over these last five years, there has been so much blogging, tweeting and status updating, that it would be hard for anyone not only to keep blogging but even to find valid reasons for doing so.
It has therefore become striking to realize that there are perhaps more bloggers and tweeterers out there than those who actually find the time -or simply bother- to read all the blog posts, interesting articles and "memes" circulating the "blogosphere". At least, I find it extremely difficult and have thus gradually shifted from being a blogger to panting out of breath to catch up with the bulk of interesting stuff piling up in my Google-Reader page. Not that I manage. Most of the times, I find myself utterly distracted, slightly dazed and disorientated in front of a dozen of open tabs, each pointing to a great album review, a nice piece published on TLS, an interesting scientific paper and a couple of reporting stories, all these in various languages (my moderate ability to read in 4 languages only worsens my distraction), none of which I manage to read in its entirety. What do I do then? I simply click on the "share" button of my browser and there it is. My somewhat interesting discovery is posted as a facebook update or a tweet, for other people to finish up what I couldn't. Read the damn thing!
It's not just me I assume. More and more we are turning into a universe of "sharers" of things that very rarely live up to their real meaning. There is simply so much of information out there that it is impossible for one to parse even the slightest portion of it. We end up reading abstracts in an abstract way, browsing through titles infested with "buzz-words", we share, we post, we forward, we like but very rarely read. Instead we create a universe of links, a web upon the web, where texts and hypertexts are connected like mass-less, volume-less dots without content.
And yes, all and all it's just another dot on the web. So please do not "like" this post!
