Internet voices that can have so little to say

They were erecting a tall aerial, the purpose of which was to allow our son to join the-then fast-growing band of CB radio enthusiasts, the "CB" standing for "Citizens' Band" (for the benefit of those who weren't around at the time).

Over the next few months, until the novelty wore off, we were treated to the wit and wisdom of many of these enthusiasts via their broadcast communications which burst out of the privacy of his room and spread throughout the upstairs of the house. We didn't know what gems he was able to impart to them because he spoke quietly into the microphone. But their side of the conversation came across loud and clear.

You couldn't help but eavesdrop. And as a result you couldn't help but notice that most of the people with whom he made contact as he trawled through the airwaves had nothing remotely significant or interesting to say.

We learned that it was a bit misty in Hull, that a chap in Chesterfield was going (reluctantly) with his wife to visit his mother-in-law, that another bloke in the North-East somewhere had seen the Beatles when they were in their glory days, and that smokeless fuel wasn't half as good as coal for producing a hot fire.

Now I've no doubt that CB radio was responsible for a lot of good things. It will have saved lives, helped motorists avoid traffic hold-ups, forged friendships, taught people that there are places in the UK that they'd never heard of, such as Diggle and Solihull. But we were never made aware of such significant matters at Radio Priestley Towers.

As far as we could observe, CB radio consisted of a lot of people with nowt to say saying it with great conviction. Eventually that was our son's conclusion too and the aerial came down, leaving holes in the rendering on the back wall that this dad had to fill with cement before the damp got in.

There's a powerful echo of that era in 2007 thanks to the blogs on the internet. Whereas the CB crowd twiddled a dial until they found someone prepared to listen to them, the bloggers post their opinions in the anticipation that sooner or later someone with nothing better to do than "surf" will come across them and find them deeply fascinating.

But there's more. This might be considered deep heresy in the world of newspapers, where readers' opinions on every issue under the sun are encouraged, particularly on the internet, as part of a move towards democratising the media and loosening the grip of the professionals.

Thus we've seen the growth of opinion and debating forums such as the one on the T&A's website. Many newspapers now have them, and as a sort of on-line, less-restricted version of the Letters to the Editor page they've been embraced with enthusiasm by people with something to say - and, unfortunately, also by people with nothing to say.

So the idea of blogs (or weblogs, a sort of online diary) and forums is somewhat undermined by those contributors who use them like a new-millennium version of the CB-radio scene or, worse, who treat them as vehicles for personal abuse of fellow contributors they've taken against.

There are some very sensible people contributing to forums. They make well-argued, valid points. And then other sensible people respond similarly. But sooner or later, down the line, the peddlers of vitriol will appear on the scene casting doubt on the sanity or sexuality of those who have opined earlier or interjecting a totally irrelevant aside which will rapidly derail the debate.

And what's more, they do so under the protection of total anonymity, using web pseudonyms in much the same way that CB folk used to use "handles".

Bloggers are rather different. The identities of some of them are known. As a result the outspoken views they sometimes express have been known to lead to death threats (not on the T&A's website, I hasten to add) on other blogs or forums by people who keep their own identities secret.

The rise of the citizen journalist has spread beyond blogs and forums to websites like my MySpace, YouTube (where user-submitted videos of terrible tedium and appallingly bad taste sit alongside others of genuine wit and wisdom) and the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

The founder of the last-named, Jimmy Wales, has acknowledged that the amateurs who now dominate the web unfettered by the rules which have traditionally kept professionals in check are getting a bit out of hand. He has proposed a code of conduct to include a stipulation that people shouldn't say anything online that they wouldn't say in person.

Fat chance! It's only the laws of defamation that have protected newspapers' letters pages, which are subject to the sort of traditional editorial control that blogs and forums escape, from becoming a similar free-for-all.

One of the most high-profile challengers of the rise of the internet is a Londoner who made his name and his fortune during the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has his own blog and recently launched a podcast chatshow about media, culture and technology. So no-one could accuse Andrew Keen of being a Luddite.

But he's deeply concerned at the way the professionalism of the media is under attack. Next month he'll outline his views in a book entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy, the gist of which has already been widely publicised.

Keen is challenging the idea that anyone should be able to use the internet to gain control of the media and turn it into a place where expertise counts for nothing and prejudices are freely aired and presented as fact.

In a feature written for The Weekly Standard newspaper he expressed his concern at the "profound consequences" of this latest phase in the digital media revolution which was changing our "cultural habits, our ways of entertaining ourselves and our ways of defining who we are".

He claimed that traditional "elitist" media is being destroyed by digital technologies, that newspapers are in freefall, that network television is being shaken.

"The iPod is undermining the multibillion dollar music industry," he wrote. "Meanwhile, digital piracyis draining revenue from established artists, movie studios, newspapers, record labels and song writers."

He acknowledged that there might be some who considered all that not to be a bad thing. But then he added: "The purpose of our media and culture industries - beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people - is to discover, nurture and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last centuryHitchcock could never have made his expensive, complex movies outside the Hollywood studio system. Bono would never have become Bono without the music industry's super-heavyweight marketing muscle.

"Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratise media, then you end up democratising talent."

The unintended consequence of all this, he warned, is "cultural flattening". He has a good point. Under this new democracy a short YouTube video of a cat falling from a tree rates the same billing as Buster Keaton's painstakingly rehearsed classic scene in which the front wall of a barn topples on him, its window frame falling around him and leaving him still standing and miraculously unscathed.

The diary of Samuel Pepys carries no greater validity than the blog of the Chesterfield bloke who, having long since traded in his CB radio for a computer, is still being pressed by his wife to go and visit her mother.

There are reasons other than this cultural flattening, though, why we should be standing back from the internet and taking a critical look at our relationship with it. One - and to my mind a key one - is the relentless pressure being exerted from so many sources to drive us into its embrace. Every television and radio programme, every newspaper and magazine, every advert for banking or booking holidays, directs us to a website.

We are all being cattle-prodded towards computer dependency. Why? Two words spring to mind: control and profit. The internet delivers the means of manipulating the population while at the same time making large amounts of money out of us.

And another important reason to beware? The social isolation that it brings. Sitting alone in a room for hours, staring at a screen while transferring your own thoughts into a blog or reading the thoughts of similar-ensnared solitary souls as expressed on theirs, is no substitute for having a chat and a laugh with neighbours over the garden fence, enjoying a heated debate over a pint at the pub or taking a challenging walk in the country with a friend or two.

The tragedy is that the new generation, fully submerged in the internet lifestyle, might never be in a position to experience any of those things.