• I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet since about 1977, when I first realised what computers could do and that they could talk to each other. I used to tell people that one day that we would all have computers and that they would be connected by the phone and that one day the final connection would be made that would turn the mass of computers into one brain.

    Of course everyone said I was mad! Many people, technologists mostly, believe that this is likely in some way.

    Thinking about the idea of the Web, this morning, I wonder if it hasn’t come alive already. I always assumed it would be a thinking, reasoning brain. What if it is just plain stupid or just not very intelligent?

    Like a spider… sitting in the middle of a web, catching anything it can, sucking the juice out and doing nothing other than surviving to do the same the next day.

    Isn’t that what the web is doing – sucking the juice out of what it is that makes us humans? Anything original that is posted on the web is immediately homogenised, made to fit into standards, broken up into bits, re-mashed, churned up and made to look like something new, which it isn’t. We come to expect standards.

    A couple of years ago it was fashionable to talk about nano technology leading us into a world of grey goo. Well, isn’t that where we are heading on the internet? A world of grey digital goo, where everything is so chopped up and interlinked that it becomes meaningless.

    A couple of days ago I posted an article about eBooks and authors. This was then posted up on a meaningless site called astonmartinnews.com. This site seems to have no reason to exist, other than to post links to other sites in the hope you will be drawn to it and then click on the advertising.

    The page says that my blog entry has been tweeted about three times from that page! There are three comments on the article each linking to adverts to sell you ebooks. The whole confection has been whipped up by computers and there has not been one human interchange in the whole affair. What the hell is it about? All that Human ingenuity put to work for absolutely nothing. And this is going on all over the web every single microsecond. As more and more spurious links are made by mindless machines, the whole net becomes a mess, the real stuff gets harder to find so we fall back on the homogenised wisdom of Wikipedia, a wonderful encyclopaedia of pop culture.

    When did you last get a really useful result from Google on the front page? The rest of the net is obsessed with SEO, search engine optimisation, which basically means that you have to lie about the quality of your content to get to the front page so you can sell some ads. Real content is to be found on page 1245.

    The net is a dead-eyed, care-less living monster that is slowly consuming our culture. Next it will begin sucking out the essence of our humanity.

    The internet is probably the greatest tool we have ever invented – it may also be the worst.

  • Here is a new video from my Drawing School – How to draw running cats. This has two drawings – one is very easy and one is a bit more advanced. I’ve developed these drawings with reception year children aged 4 and 5. They follow along and do beautiful drawings. So do their teachers, who are often more pleased than the children – so have a go. As ever, if you like the video please rate it with the stars in the top left hand corner and why not subscribe to my YouTube channel?

  • Firefox keeps updating and improving. The most recent addition is prettyfication with personas, which make the browser easier on the eye but the tool bar harder to read, depending on the persona you choose.

    I have only one quibble with this. Along with the pretty toolbars has come a little picture in the footer bar. I know it’s meant to be a Firefox Fox, but to me it looks very like the Foxybingo.com Fox. (No I’m not going to add a link.)

    I’m sticking to Safari on my mac. The Jeremy Kyle show is sponsored by Foxy Bingo. I’m worried that they might hijack my webcam and I’ll find I’m live on National TV, right in the middle of some ghastly story about a boyfriend-beating, drug-using beauty with shaved hair and very few teeth who wonders why her Mother doesn’t love her.