Arrogance is the ultimate in shortsightedness. It is also the ultimate in unoriginal thought. The blogging/twittering/friendfeeding/ world is navel gazing again. This time the lint that is getting pulled out is all about the lack of original thought in blogging as opposed to linking and piling on and page view hunting, and on and on and on....
First, there hasn't been much original thought in any sphere of human endeavor that involves writing in a long, long time. And the trends and patterns are just the same. The only difference is the method of sharing the stories. Heck, I'm not sure what history will look on more kindly, oral communication and its ways of morphing an original idea, or blogging, and twittering, and etc... and its way of linking and changing a story. At least with blogging, etc... some of the time the original source gets credit.
And this whole social graph, networking thing? About as new as talking to your neighbors at the post office, or at the market, or over the mastodon kill, or over the just about anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the world is smaller because of the Intertubes but no matter the size of the pub the suds still flow the same way.
Oh, and the characters that populate this ongoing play that the Internet is just another scene in? You could pick them out of a Greek tragedy by Euripides, or a Roman comedy by Plautus. The characters remain the same, the actors just change. Shakespeare did. But that was back in the days before perpetual copyright.
The end isn't near and don't everyone break a sweat looking for original thought, even if you are unafraid it might bite you in the ass.
When you view the world from behind your nose it is tough to look behind you and see that you're looking at what others have already seen. And the bald spot on the back of your noggin is just part of the view.
