On ranting, sub-cultures and incoherent readings

This article from Dave's place has made me think a little today - which is no mean achievement, as quality thinking time seems to be escaping me of late.

The curious - and different - thing about the Internet is how easy it is to stumble across work which was never intended for the audience one may form a part of.  A lot of what we read may be classifiable as incoherent - not because the writer doesn't know his or her audience accurately enough but rather because a different audience has seeped into the frame.  The incoherence comes from the inappropriate nature of the relationship between creator and receiver.  Clarity and simplicity should perhaps be the objectives of all writers, and thus ways of resolving such incoherence - but however clearly and simply we write, in such an openly accessible medium such as the Internet we cannot avoid confusing some people.  Or, indeed, ending up accused of being obfuscators, elitists, patronisers or - more objectively, as in this case - just plain incompetent.

A revolution, however, requires crossover in industrial quantities.  Not sure that the Internet is actually achieving this any more.  'Seems to me that, more and more, there's so much room out there to debate our thoughts that all we are doing is creating little planetary masses of belief which orbit complex solar systems without ever coming close to the kind of shared experience that could usefully serve to bring societies together.

We may find that in the future we will have so much space that we really won't have to agree - society-wide I mean - on anything.  What a luxury that will be.

A sub-culture of fat PSP players who struggle to get through life as best they can versus a sub-culture of the virtuously thin and politically minded with the advantages of intellect, education and the gumption to be pointedly (even where maybe rightly) sarcastic about all that they see around them?

Either way, barriers are being built on both sides I think.

It's the sub-cultures that are appearing which we really do need to get away from.

(And there I was thinking that it would be the Internet which would have achieved this.)