Having just got back from a week of lacking civilized things like Twitter, Chatroulette and the Slap Chop, it's literally overwhelming how much content is being hurled at the folks who reside in civilization every moment.
I've returned to the inevitable 300 new emails (a low total due to the out of office notification) and out of habit threw the TV on. The lack of importance, relevance or, well, meaning in what I saw was astonishing. Assorted teen stupidity, assorted housewife stupidity, assorted stupidity from cultures all over the world, interrupted by infomercials for pointless kitchen products and get-rich-quick schemes. It really struck me that there's a lot of things being put on air just to fill up time, or to aid in the marketing of other things. And that's just not good programming. (Or smart marketing.)
The repetition of all this crap is depressing. As the number of channels grows, the number of content providers seems to shrink, as do the budgets for producing shows. So the same homogenized content shows up across several apparently unrelated channels. And every network operates the same way.
And given that we caught a lot of radio on the way home, it's depressing that radio, with its far lower operating budgets, also finds the need to repeat playlists and on-air talent from station to station, and community to community.
The internet (for now) offers us more voices, more independence of thought. As traditional media cower from unique voices and do anything to maximize dollars, we readers and citizens and consumers must turn to the only medium that offers insight, and allow us a measure of control.