How the Internet can release our creativity

Firstly: Today, I wanted to risk readers’ patience by stepping away from the usual lambasting our corrupt, self-serving, greedy, lying elites for a moment to express my own amazement at how the Internet can enable a massive outburst of creativity.

Let me give just one example: Yesterday I got a hint from a reader’s comment on a newspaper website that there might be something worth looking at in the running of Greece’s railways. I, of course, know even less about Greece’s railways than I do about quantum physics. Before the arrival of the Internet, it would have been virtually impossible for me to research and write the story. It would have taken me days (or even weeks) to find out if there was a story worth writing. Then probably days more reading all kinds of obscure reports and whatnot to get the facts.

Now, with the Internet, it takes a few minutes Googling to find out if there’s a story and just a few minutes more to put it together. This has taken massive power away from the ‘experts’ whether real or self-proclaimed and given this power to ordinary people. Sadly, most experts (especially economists) have the imagination of an unsalted peanut and the communication skills of a broken cistern. But as they had the knowledge, they had power. However, the Internet has taken away that power and given it to us. Provided you have a couple of ideas and can communicate reasonably clearly, with all the world’s knowledge just a few clicks away, you can achieve what would have been unthinkable when the Internet didn’t exist.

Before the Internet, most effort would be spent finding information rather than thinking about how to use it and communicate it. Now, finding any information about anything takes just a few minutes, leaving us time to work with that information.

I find this incredibly liberating as it allows even someone of quite limited intellectual abilities like myself, to write almost intelligently about a huge range of subjects. In spite of all my books and my blog, I’ve still hardly scratched the surface of the Internet’s potential. In fact, I suspect few of us are really exploiting the power of the Internet in our own lives.

We all now have almost all the world’s knowledge within our grasp. The challenge is how to use this new power.

Secondly: As some readers might know, I’m working on a video to be released on the Internet on Friday 27 March. I hope readers will visit snouts-in-the-trough.com on Friday 27 March and then help send this video out to as many people as possible.

Thirdly: In the meantime, here’s a mildly amusing clip – The David Cameron Rap – for those who haven’t seen it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YBumQHPAeU  But the producer’s suggestion, that the solution to Cameron’s general pompous uselessness is to make Ed “Two Kitchens” Miliband PM, doesn’t seem particularly sensible to me.