Rampant Hypocrisy

So I was mentioning my humble blog here to a couple of friends, in a shameless bid for attention, and it got me to thinking. I've decided that the fact that someone like me can freely and easily publish a blog is a prime example of what is wrong with the internet.

I don't so much have a problem with the idea that anyone anywhere can post whatever's on their mind at anytime. On paper (or electrons as it were) that seems like a wonderfully democratic idea. Power to the people and all that. And I'm not particularly interested in the reporting vs. rumor-mongering conflict; I'll leave that one to actual journalists. No, the problem as I see it is this: Here I sit sending the floatsam and jetsam of my mind off into the world but there's no obligation on my part to justify my blog's existance by, oh I don't know, attracting readers. I'm all for self-indulgence, but all I'm really doing here is making the signal to noise ratio of the internet worse. And let's face it, the internet is already 50% noise (along with 49% porn and 1% useful information (hmm, should porn be counted as useful information?)).

This of course does not mean I plan to delete my blog and retreat back into the aether (that would be the hypocrisy part of the title). While I love the net, I also hate it a little bit, so making it worse doesn't really bother me all that much. So I guess I'll continue to sporadically strike a blow for my inner Luddite by continuing to waste bandwidth.