The Internet is one of the most amazing creations of the latter part of the 20th Century. Never before have so many been so connected; and it has never been easier to share and distribute information. For it shares a property with what some say about the Spirit world: There are no distances.

The whole Internet is a 32-bit gigantic address space that is immediately addressable; there is no need for complex delivery, local routers that take time, overnight transports (FidoNet comes to mind) – everything happens instantly. The time it takes to connect to a newspaper in Singapore, or the government office two miles away, is insignificant.

There are four billion unique addresses, all of them spread out like a flat surface in front of us, each node immediately accessable.

Of course, this means that everyone can also reach you, which is why we have so much spam.

It also means that there are few filters; filters in the form of editors, agents or journalists, whose job it is to filter through that torrent of data streaming in, and disseminating it, sorting away the irrelevant and providing quality. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the blogsphere – so little critical thinking, so little original content, and so many mindless parrots echoing what everyone else said.

The quantity has increased a hundredfold, but the quality suffers.

Maybe there will come a day when we want to shut off all that noise, and employ people for us to sift through everything so we don’t need to process it. Right now, everybody reads everything, and as a result, nobody really knows anything.

Quality or quantity? What’s your choice?