Digital Diarrhoea

I had a good old chuckle at Claire Beale's Opinion piece in last week's Campaign. Having wasted another morning reading yet more uninformed opinions on newssites and hopping mindlessly from one obscure blog to the next (more paddling than surfing), all in the name of trying to put my finger on the Zeitgeist, Claire hit the spot.

She was actually writing about the "Complaints Culture", specifically complaining about ads. People do - in their thousands - because they can and because it's easy:

"Yet our complaining culture is not simply a result of an effortless system for lodging dissatisfaction. It's also a result of the cult of the individual, the growing sense of our own importance and a growing belief in the wider significance of our ideas and opinions that has been nurtured by the digital revolution.

We're all blogging, Tweeting, telling everyone we know as often as we can what we think and feel about everything. And, of course, we all assume everyone's interested in this digital diarrhoea.

The media has helped drive this sense of importance, falling over itself to encourage comment from audiences and, in turn, eagerly using this wealth of opinion as fresh content (which the audience is invited to comment on, creating a terrifying cycle of comment on content on comment that might never end)."

Oh dear, now I'm guilty, too, after regurgitating that lot. Someone pass me the blog roll!