The Unforgiving MinutePaul Currion struggles to explain himself.

1. I’ve been without internet for a couple of weeks, which has been great. For all the goods that the internet delivers – and those goods are unmistakeably rich – there’s too much garbage out there to make it worth too much of your time. Ruthless cropping of RSS feeds, avoidance of anything resembling Twitter, radical scepticism about any claims made on behalf of the internet¹ – these must be your watchwords. They are mine, at least while I’m in the garden with a spade.
2. I’ve discovered that I find my own views quite boring and obvious, and you are free to agree with this. What this means in practice is that my writing has been constrained by my low tolerance for those views, which means that I never quite manage to write the posts that I think are quite important, the posts that help me to develop those views into something more worthwhile. This leads me to admiration and envy of those who do manage to get their thoughts out more effectively, and more importantly manage to make those thoughts engaging even when they aren’t necessarily saying anything particularly interesting.
3. Ironically one of the main things to remember about the internet doesn’t concern the internet at all. It’s this: almost nobody’s opinions are formed through discussion. With rare exceptions, pretty much everybody forms their views mainly through cultural osmosis – absorbing the views of those around them – and to a lesser extent personal reflection on that osmosis. The mix varies depending on the individual, but you’re unlikely to find many people who can state with confidence that their views were honed in the cut and thrust of debate. We’ve been tricked by tricky Greek philosophers who used the dialogue form to communicate ideas, assuming that dialogue was the way in which those ideas were developed. Doubtful.
4. My conclusion from this small insight is that the role of the internet – and particularly the web – as the new public square is both trivially true and dangerously false. It’s true in that the web does to some extent reflect the public sphere, and dangerous in the sense that in fact it shapes the public sphere more than it should, acting as an amplifier for any view in sight, whatever its worth. It’s trivial because most people remain themselves in whatever public square they happen to be in, and the majority of people are neither particularly well-informed or particularly articulate in their views; and it’s of course false because the web – for all its capacities – is not in fact a public square.
5. None of this means that I’m going to post more regularly, or post anything more interesting.

1. Until such time as the internet has the capacity to make claims on behalf of itself, anybody claiming to speak on its behalf is asking for trouble. [↩]

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