Too often blogs (including this one) reshare a piece of writing in the interest of generating more content. More content means more hits, more readers. More, more, more. What it does not mean is original thought or commentary. It does not mean a new piece of writing that encourages a laugh or a thought or an emotion. It's not that every original piece does that (and again, I'll raise my hand and accept some guilt), but it might.

I read a quote recently about writing (and I've seen it more times than I can count from other writers) that writing is made up of hard work and discipline. It takes place when the house is quiet and dark. When done properly,it can make the writer wish they were doing almost anything else. It spurs the creation of rationalization and excuses. It causes a tightness in the chest that makes one wonder why they're sitting there, trying to breathe life into a word, a phrase, a paragraph. In a sense, despite many not being paid for it, writing is not for amateurs. 

With blogs writing has morphed into this thing for amateurs. Worse yet, a new crop of professional writers has emerged. A new plagiarism has emerged. It's not what you might remember from college where a student lifts a passage from an obscure book to supplement their paper without citing it. It's an idea that all writing and thought is content or raw materials to be used to beef up your site. It exists for your commentary. While most writers I've known are happy their work is read and mentioned, this new plagiarism saps the discourse of new ideas. It makes us lazy.

Television news seems to be especially bad at this. Their experts are personalities who generate sound bites from multiple sources and then parrot it out on show after show. The television news media then picks it up and runs it over and over as news. The cycle then continues when the information is taken back to the blogs, recycled again for the talking heads to harvest and take back to the television news panels.

Original thought and analysis are hard. Sometimes it's appropriate to use a piece to springboard into another thought piece. Sometimes it's not.  When it's not, I'm going to try to share things more often via my Google Reader feed, at least then it's just called promotion.

 There is a democratization of content that, I believe, is going to injure commerce in these areas. We've moved away from a handful of voices captivating us with their shows and messages (think Big 3 on TV and local radio) to consumers expressing a desire to curate their own content. What's interesting about this curation is that the generational shift is clear and easy to see. 

• My parents (older boomers) use their TiVo to record shows like they did with a VCR. While they time shift, they're just pulling what they want out of the stream. Netflix (which they signed up for in the past year) offers them a wrinkle on the video store. Sirius is like cable for the car. Nothing too revolutionary. 

• In my household (Gen X) we use TiVo to record shows and time shift. We're also using Netflix through our Internet enabled television and doing some streaming. I'll use Pandora on my phone to stream when I can't get to Sirius. In addition to convenience, our household is starting to cut out commercials. Increasingly, none of the services we use force us to watch commercials. 

• Some of my co-workers (Millenials) are bypassing everything. They're maybe renting music through Rhapsody, but none of them watch television over the air, instead choosing to stream content from the internet. Additionally, they're bypassing printed media for online links (and avoiding the pay sites like the plague) and steering well clear of commercial radio. While they're paying for Netflix or Rhapsody, the old passive model of someone else programming content and offering with commercials is not part of their worldview. 

The desire to control content has grown among consumers as radio and television became all about corporate entities making money. Remember when networks showed quality (or at least entertaining) programming? Now the bottom line dictates what is put on the air (think reality shows, cheap and easy to control). Remember when local DJs selected music? Now corporate consultants program from a central location.  While these moves generated short-term profit they hurt the product. As a result, consumers looked to new technology to democratize their entertainment.

So where is this leading? I suspect that the old commerce models are going to die. That doesn't mean that consumers will never passively receive content from providers. I think the problem is that those providers are going to see large declines in revenue year after year. That means they'll squeeze more money out of the process, sending more people in search of the content they want the way they want it. I don't believe this will result in an explosion of self-produced television (music is another matter), but I do think that consumers will stop waiting for content to find them. 

The other thing it will do is chase consumers to premium services (HBO, Sirius, etc.). People will pay for what they want. The old models of content production and broadcast are likely on their way out. Twenty years ago we had three networks, Fox starting out, and a lot of bad cable channels showing Patrick Swayze movies all the time. Twenty years from now we're likely to have no network news, no locally generated radio, and viable decentralized publishing and music industries. The bad news is we'll lose convenience, the good news is that as we move away from big companies and profit we may actually get innovation again.