Status updates – The death of original content?

It came to me recently while spending some quality time on Facebook. My entire News Feed, all of my friends’ statuses, were comprised of links to youtube, and comments about those videos.

This made me think: what’s going on here?

Then it hit me… It’s no longer ‘I think therefore I am’, that age old saying has changed to ‘I post therefore I am”. Thinking has been removed from the equation.

Let me explain my point of view.

Thinking is hard. Creating original content (even as tiny as a Facebook status) is difficult. It requires one to think, to organize words into a semblance of structure that conveys an idea or an opinion. Having an opinion means thinking about a position relative to a premise or concept. Having an idea means reasoning, using logic, and adding something, contributing, however slightly, to the greater good of society.

The majority of people no longer ‘create’ original content in their Facebook statuses, they ‘comment’ on what someone else created, and that is a dangerous thing indeed. Without creativity, without original thinking, what is the worth of Man? A monkey can comment by going ooh-ooh-ah-ah… But a monkey can’t create. Words are thoughts, thinking is intelligence, intelligence is creativity, creativity is progress… Posting and commenting… means nothing in the grand scheme of things, it makes people lazy. Why think of something original when someone can ‘search’ for something original on-line and then comment about it?

So that’s my take on the matter. As a marketer, I don’t mind, it makes my job easier. Give someone something to post on Facebook and watch the message spread like wildfire. However, as a writer it annoys me. I believe that even little opportunities to be creative, to be original, to write out loud, make us better people, give our brains a workout. I worry that if this continues, on-line brains will become nothing more than pointers, a tool to be used for SEO… Wait… That has already happened… Never mind.