Monkeys with Typewriters. Opinion.

In the digital cage most monkeys are producing absolute garbage on their typewriters and only a minority are producing Shakespeare. This is what Casey Lynn touched upon in an interesting and entertaining article about bloggers.

What he refers to is the quantity of sites/blogs/words online which are actually useful or interesting, and the rest which are forming 'an endless digital forest of mediocrity'.
(Andrew Keen, 'The Cult of the Amateur', 2007)

It was a great read for a bloginner who's determined to keep on the right path, and be a provider of information rather than a waste of web-bites. So I’d recommend a read, especially if you're just starting up writing or reporting online.

Where did I find Lynn's thought-provoking article?
I came across his article after exploring the Delicious.com website. This website, similar to Trunk.ly is a social bookmarking website, where you can explore other peoples collected links and create your own 'stacks'. This is another tip I collected from my digital class last Thursday.

Going back to the article about monkeys with typewriters, further on it discusses the differences between bloggers and journalists. Whereas the book by Andrew Keen, which motivates the article, argues the internet is killing culture because we can’t tell the good from the bad, Lynn disagrees saying bloggers are able to add to news in different ways. He says even subconsciously we are checking what we read for accuracy, and I totally agree. I guess blogging could be seen as a kind of micro-news source, making up the bigger picture of what journalism is today. This is what my blog will aim to do. The rise of blogging’s popularity reflects the failings of the mainstream media. Through blogging, we can bring news to wider audiences, and reflect variety. So not only can journalists and bloggers co-exist peacefully, as Lynn believes, but we actively need both for a more democratic society. Journalists need to get out of the cage and find the news, and the bloggers in us need to get the words and views down in print, through whatever view or filter we put on it, so we can read it back in a variety of ways from a variety of sources.  

This is what I aim to do in my blog, report news, but also offer opinion posts and a different way of reading it.