Is anyone else surprised at the amount of crap they read online? Sometimes, I think I spend entire days reading crap. I actually have to do a double-take when I read something original, because my mind’s been blown for 10 consecutive days by– you guessed it– crap.

It’s hard to define crap. Fellow Brazen Careerist user Hannah Kane is too nice to use the word “crap,” or even suggest it (and so was I), but she did ask a great question about identifying crap just two days ago– specifically regarding the career advice variety of crap. I should have been honest with her, and mentioned crap.

But I hate to use a word that no one can quite define, yet that describes something ubiquitous– it’s tricky. As a writer, it’s against my religion. And as a person, it just gives me a headache.

Besides, I think you need to know crap when you see it. If you’re not sure yet, you’re either a source of crap, or you need to find yourself some real-life mentors so you can learn how to suss it out.

The ubiquity of crap is nothing new, of course.

The same thing is happening to blogs and web writing that’s been happening to business (copy)writing for years: good old language dilution.

Partly, social media’s to blame– the mainstreaming of a tool always generates a lot of white noise in the language. Not the tool itself, but its girth.

That’s why you read the same blog about the same thing about 400,000 times with only the slightest variations, and it’s why you sometimes feel overwhelmed by crap. Remember Andy Warhol’s soup cans? Or his Marilyn screens? A striking comment on something that, at the time, was still intrinsic to our national success: the assembly line. The sameness. Commercialism, the explosion of stuff.

But repetition can also file away the sheen, dilute the original. Discourage creation, even.

Jason Fried writes,

“Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions. Words are treated as filler — ‘stuff’ that takes up space on a page.” -Jason Fried, in Inc.

I’m not innocent of this peculiar handicap. Good God, no. I wish I could pretend that I have never written any crap in my life, but I’d be lying – after all, writers get paid to write crap. At my last job, I wrote something original and, to my mind, quite fun, and the CEO looked me in the eye and told me to take all that frigging personality out and make the piece “sound luxurious.” In other words, he didn’t want anyone to know anything at all. He just wanted me to write some good crap.

The crap is never-ending. It’s an endless sea of crap.

And sometimes crap serves a specific purpose. Like the buzzwords it contains, the crap itself has a kind of gloss to it. Even if it’s murderously dull and derivative, in certain corporate applications, everyone’s going to put their hands in their pockets and go along with it, because it maintains the status quo.

The onus is on all of us to figure that out and know when to say, “You know, I really think that’s just a bunch of crap.” I especially mean you, the talented ones – you writers, communicators, creatives-cum-”PR people.”

Because, frankly, you’re killing me with this crap.