I used to think it was spam choked up the internet, millions and millions of unsolicited emails every second.

I was mistaken, it appears Stephen Fry is now the main drain on the worlds bandwidth. Not directly, and I’m not blaming him, but its just the way the internet is these days.

The cause of this blockage is called social networking, and technically, even blogs like this very one are part of it.

Back in the day, a few people with talent generated content for the internet. It initially required some geeks to help do the coding, and the geeks and nerds soon got fed up with this and made some applications and websites that creative types could use without having to interrupt them from their all night gaming sessions.

Usenet – bulletin boards – trolls were invented. Spam, garbage. They became shite
Then it all got more fancy and people spread themselves out a bit.

Soon everyone had a website. Most were shite.
Soon everyone had a blog. Most were shite.

There’s a reason for 99% them being crap and going nowhere.

It takes effort to write original thoughts day after day, to keep content updated, to be interesting, to want to seek and develop a readership, to be kind and courteous. And most people don’t have it in them. Either the effort, the drive, the words, the creativity, the originality or all of the above.

So then – here’s where the internet has all gone wrong. With Twitter and Facebook, anyone can write stuff and lots of people (the social part of social networking) get to see it. Before, with blogs, you had to make an audience. Now, anyone can add all their mates to Facebook and start publicly talking shite in small and manageable bursts. Worse still, as lots of these people are incapable of originality, its all copied and forwarded stuff. And with the 6 degrees of separation thing, pretty soon, word gets around.

Why is this a bad thing?

Well, it means the proletariat, the great unwashed, Joe Public gets to speak and people have no choice but to hear them. No longer is the internet a safe haven of intelligent life, its now the gutter full of crap, endlessly copied and pasted, forwarded, recycled like London drinking water. This sounds terribly elitist and I guess it is really. I really don’t want to hear a billion people who’s IQ places them in to the retarded category of intelligence. I want peace, intelligence, clarity and debate with people who’s idea of original thought is more than copy and paste.

So, back to poor old Stephen Fry. He uses Twitter. A lot. And, as he’s rather funny, most of the people in the visible universe follow him on there. So, as a consequence, when he writes something of interest, as he so often does being a clever and articulate chap, a few million people copy and paste, retweet, blog, facebook update, myspaceface it, whatever. And their few millions of friends all do the same. And suddenly, Stephen Fry, by proxy, has blocked the internet with endless jibber jabber, static, noise, garbage and the utter polar opposite of original thought.

That’s why social networking is a bad thing. People can’t be trusted with it. For the most part, they are too universally stupid to use it for the advancement of the human race. Instead, its like a endless echoes of people getting hot under the collar about something in the Daily Mail that, frankly, I don’t give a toss about.