Transition Culture

15 Dec 2006

Peak Blogs.

These are dark days indeed. Apparently the world is facing a new danger, to join peak oil and peak gas in an unholy Trinity, peak blogs. The BBC reports that apparently the middle of 2007 is when the world will hit peak blogs, and from that point total global blog post production will go into a relentless and steady decline. Although total global blog production currently stands at about 1.3 million individual posts a day (about half of which is the steady stream of over-optimistic nonsense churned out by Transition Culture), it is estimated by the analysts Gartner that the world will peak mid-2007 at around 100 million blog sites. Kenneth Deffeyes has not yet been quoted as saying anything about Thanksgiving Day, but it is surely only a matter of time. Apparently the reason is that the kinds of people daft enough to spend hours of their lives writing the kind of drivel that most blogs contain are a limited species, and as a resource they are pretty much exhausted.

I find myself in the camp that thinks that Peak Blogs is not necessarily a bad thing, that the future beyond blogs could be preferable to the present, but only if we begin preparing in time, relearning skills that our grandparents all had, such as actually talking to each other and perhaps even actually doing stuff. Indeed we may come to look back at the Blog Age as a mere historical blip before people rediscovered the beauty of actually talking to each other. Of course there are also the optimists, who believe that a new online phenomena will take its place, that technology will always resolve these problems. While it might be the case that there are vast untapped reserves of potential bloggers out there, I think that those, like Gartner who argue that we can know fairly thoroughly that not many new would-be-bloggers remain, are probably right. We must, indeed, begin preparations for Life Beyond Blogs.