Do We All Deserve To Be Writers?

The Internet and blogs make it possible for almost anyone to publish their own work. The work of Hume, St. Thomas Aquinas, Bede, or even Thomas Jefferson would be lost to the masses if someone did not see the merit and have their respective works published. That filter, good or bad, is gone now; anyone can publish and have an audience only a Google search away.

That which gives us a voice can also drown out the truly important writing. I find myself looking at Google searches of condensed commentaries to gain a more complete perspective on topics that interest me. The Internet, unlike the reading assignments for this class, seems like a wide pool of information, but if I try and dive into the water, I find a shallow bottom.


We live in a complex and fast moving world. If great ideas take long detailed explanations, will people take the time to digest the information? I constantly stop myself from scanning and force my mind to read for comprehension. I do not read an entire blog entry, but read the title and the first couple sentences, and if it seems interesting, I read the entire entry. I just don’t have time for anything else. Is it true, have I become another victim to the information overload?

Maybe the Internet is an imperfect place to gather information and absorb intellectual ideas; there is a pop up ad screaming for my attention or an embedded link that carries my mind and computer screen so far away from my starting point, I never return to the document I originally intended to read.

Before I started this blog, I did not realize how my reading and writing habits have changed so much in just a few short years. Damn you, Internet. Hey, maybe I can Google it and find the answer to my problem.