Is it even possible to create original content in this age?

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I've been blogging for more than three years now. And I love doing it, hell, I think my blog is pretty fucking awesome. But there's a problem I've been noticing lately. Every single piece of content I write has probably been written hundred times before. By mainstream media, by authors, by bloggers, by you. There's no way around it, and it bugs me to infinity. Take this specific post for instance, I won't even google it, but I can guess plenty of others writers have faced these thoughts and wrote about them from their own viewpoints. The irony of the situation is fantastic.

The amount of information on the internet is overwhelming. Thousands of blogposts created every day, hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, infinite tweets (check out this cool infographic). And only so many things you can tell. Which pretty much means that no matter what you write, someone else surely wrote it before you. All the topics have been covered so many times it's silly. You feel you're stealing other people's ideas even if you aren't. Or are you?

I'm one of those people who tries to absorb as much information as possible. I want to learn every day, synthesizing the gathered knowledge for various reasons, such as my work or this blog. From this perspective, I'm inevitably copying other people's ideas, rewriting content that's already been written many times before. Stealing Lego blocks and using them to build new sculptures. Is there even such a thing as an original idea? There probably really aren't that many.

Writers and bloggers are just a bunch of monkeys who are trying to write Shakespeare anyways. Curators, who are striving to separate the sheep from the goats, blending extraordinary ideas into somethings even greater. And that's what matters, that's where the value is added. Even though most of the content is not original, if any. But I guess that's ok, I just needed to think and write about it, which helped me understand this is the very essence of blogging.

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written 15.7.2012 12:52 CET on chronolog
2649 views   •   1 like   •   5 comments  •   Like   •   
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