We are living in the Age of Noise. Not the age of information; not the age of dis-information. The age of noise.

There is a large number of people whose salaries are based on number of words written or articles published, and/or on number of views generated. These people need to produce to make a living.

There are marketing strategies that are based on producing and pushing content across all platforms; recycling a speech into an article, into a video, into a picture, into an audio, into infographics. Companies need to produce to be seen.

In the noisy environment, freelancers, bloggers, artists… disappear under an avalanche of content from others… unless they produce.

People who look for recognition on social media… need to push out content to get in front of others, to be seen & recognized. They need to produce.

Media cannot report that nothing newsworthy has happened. They need to produce.

It gets so noisy out there it’s impossible. In the morning, a magazine publishes 4 reasons why coffee is good for you whilst in the evening they warn that coffee can damage your health. Magazines produce empty articles; people speak with nothing to say; universities offer courses with no content. Quality has been pushed to the sidelines long ago… but it’s alright, because the noise is there and we need to be louder than the person next to us. Adding one voice to a myriad of voices, majority with nothing to say. I cannot take it anymore. Mute & unfollow are the default options. I’ll end with Nassim Taleb’s aphorism:

“The information-rich Dark Ages: in 2010, 600.000 books were published, just in English, with few memorable quotes. Circa AD zero, a handful of books were written. In spite of the few that survived, there are loads of quotes.”