I find myself facing a constant flow of arguments, both online and in person, along these lines…

“Everything on (insert Internet service here) is crap and nothing but idiots jabbering to idiots!”

Comments like this say much more about the commenter, than the actual usefulness of any online service. The commenter doesn’t find something useful so, to make themselves feel wiser and/or more important, they decide that no one should find it useful. Surely, once they have deemed something unworthy, everyone should see the light , turn off their browsers and get back to work.

Unable to find any value for themselves in a service, they try to make themselves feel better by declaring it useless for everyone else, despite the fact that thousands of people find a service useful every day. Their not crazy, everyone else is, of course!

I can’t imagine where civilization would be if we had ever listened to the nay-sayers like this, who seek to dictate a world that perfectly meets their specifications. Luckily, we seem to be intelligent enough to understand the true nature of their complaints and simply ignore them. Still, it grows more and more tedious every day to constantly face their onslaught. I would guess we would still be working with stone tools and wearing skins if they had their way. Surely there isn’t any value in reading, writing, philosophy or higher learning. What has it ever done for them?

There is an important lesson here, though. Internet services, no matter how inane the content might first appear, succeed at a more fundamental level — they foster communication — the basic building block of progress throughout the ages. When people communicate, problems gets solved, wars are ended and civilization takes another bold step up the evolutionary ladder.

I will wade through 100,000 stupid YouTube videos or a million Twitter posts, because I know that each and every one of them is another conversation — another attempt to communicate. If the nay-sayers truly want to make a difference then I challenge them to engage in the conversation — or simply go away. The rest of us are busy communicating — and walking into the future, together.