inignoct wrote:
] fnord wrote:
] ] "Newspapers ... serve a very valuable function. ... (They)
] ] help us figure out what's really important."
] ]
] ] what a motherfucker
]
] indeed. i can't think of a worse situation for democracy than
] when all media is controlled by the same source (no matter
] what it is). But it's not surprising -- seems like most
] americans (maybe most people everywhere, but i only live here)
] are intellectually lazy, and don't want to have to grapple
] with differing viewpoints or complex situations, so it's
] easier when all the media says the same thing.

I think this one of the key impacts that the internet is having on our society. The medium is the message, right? Well, this medium, unlike the ones we've had previously, forces you to make choices. In the past there were only a handful of broadcasters and everyone assumed that everything they were saying was true. That was sometimes a bad assumption, but it worked well enough that people have developed a tendancy to always beleive in everything they read. You can see Powell struggle with this himself in this interview.

A lot of the stuggles over the internet have been related to this new reality. You are now exposed to a lot of junk. You have to figure out what makes sense and what does not make sense. You have to think. People are not yet very good at that. They are worried, for example, about children not being able to make these choices. Their response, instead of teaching their kids to filter (which they can't do because they don't know how to do it themselves) is to install net nannys, which allow professional filters to do the work for them.

Over time... Maybe over the course of a generation, we'll learn to do the filtering ourselves, and this will make us a stronger society. A populace with strong bullshit detectors, armed with good information, will, I think, make better collective decisions.

Weblogs are an important part of this process. You need to be able to share your decisions about what makes sense so that we can break up the work and so that we can teach eachother how to do this right.

RE: asshole