I’ve been on the Internet long enough to remember when it was not ubiquitous. Rather, it was a place where (mostly) introverts could go to find like-minded souls away from their face-to-face lives. There was a lot more anonymity and more of a sense of Route 66 than Information Superhighway.

As social networks have come to dominate the landscape and the corporate world has recognized how lucrative information is in the 21st century, the WWW has lost all intimacy. What I used to enjoy about being online has disappeared almost entirely from places like Facebook.

Although the mixing of ideas and exchange of creativity can foment artistic output, moreover, eventually too much of the world discourages it. Not only the inevitable negative criticism from an over-wide audience causes the less hardy to wilt, but in the hyperlinked world the sense of “It’s all been done.”

For example, many schools now use a software program called “Turn It In” to evaluate student submissions for plagiarism. The program’s producers have an enormous (and continually growing) database of all previous written work. Upon submission, the student’s own work is added to the store of all the work that’s come before.

I have problems with this software’s premise because eventually it seems to me that students will become more and more “guilty” of plagiarism inadvertently because only so many views about, say, Hamlet are valid. Although teachers, of course, do not want students’ copying the work of someone else, I really see nothing wrong with someone “discovering” something about Hamlet that someone else working separately has already discovered. Why the presumption that being born first gives a birthright to ideas? Why keep writing about Hamlet if the only valid writing finds more and more obscure points?

Aside from Turn It In, the Internet inherently contributes to this phenomenon. Consider trying to come up with something like a band name and then googling to see whether such a band name already exists. Again, trademark of a name ought protect a well-known successful band against infringement, but why can two obscure bands not share the same name–especially if it’s a great name, and those who happened on it first have not put it to good use?

In any case, part of the point of this blog will be to express my ideas without worrying about a) whether they’re really original (as inevitably they won’t be) and b) not even worry about their quality. This is a semi-private spot among the cyber hub-bub for unmodulated thinking and verbalizing of those thoughts.