Cory Doctorow, in remarking on YouTube reaching the astonishing rate of 1 hour of video uploaded per second, shares this excerpt from a forthcoming book. I thought it was really great:
A common tactic in discussions about the Internet as a free speech medium is to discount Internet discourse as inherently trivial. Who cares about cute pictures of kittens, inarticulate YouTube trolling, and blog posts about what you had for lunch or what your toddler said on the way to day-care? Do we really want to trade all the pleasure and economic activity generated by the entertainment industry for *that*? The usual rebuttal is to point out all the “worthy” ways that we communicate online: the scholarly discussions, the terminally ill comforting one another, the distance education that lifts poor and excluded people out of their limited straits, the dissidents who post videos of secret police murdering street protesters.
All that stuff is important, but when it comes to interpersonal communications, trivial should be enough.
