Over the past 15 years of using the internet, one of the memes that always comes up is that of “connecting people” and that of getting to the bottom of things, the “spreading of knowledge”.
My experience is a different one: it used to be this way. I remember when researching about my canoo trip in northern Canada, I found lots of really useful pages of people who had done these trips before or who lived in the area and took pleasure in informing. This sort of research has pretty much disappeared from my life, because it’s almost impossible to find valuable information. SEO and bland content farming created a worthless web of information (pardon the pun).
Going hand in hand with this is the delusion of democratizing relationships because you can now directly “connect with your fans”. As this latest story on Mashable about George Takei’s ghostwriter shows, it’s the same as it used to be: the audience is falling for manufactured publicity from professional media creators, only now it’s even harder to recognize and the audience is actively helping to promote it.
I’m sorry, but this doesn’t strike me as a free thinking society but more of a blatant display of how sheepish humans can be and how important it is to be alert and observant.