Everybody jokes about “TMI” these days: “Too much information,” we say laughingly,
when someone tells a story full of embarrassing detail about some personal foible or intimate relationship. But in our information-overloaded society, the concept of TMI is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides — the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels — is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience.
But the implications for our democracy are troubling. To achieve their goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of millions of citizens. Despite conventional thinking that the Internet helps spread information, such reach is actually impossible online.
In August 2007, there were about 100 million blogs. Of those that reached 100,000 people or more in a month, only about 20 focused on news or politics, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a company that measures Internet traffic.
By contrast, The Washington Post’s print edition reaches about 2 million readers on Sunday, more than 35 percent of whom are likely to read the editorial page, according to a Mediamark Research study.
Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).
If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it?
Of course the whole thing could be brilliant satire. I certainly hope so.
“brilliant satire”
Y’think? When the first Google search item on Dusty Horwitt is for a Bill Clinton impersonator?
Then again, he does have a point, the Washington Post does check facts.
Aside from this being an asinine as well as bizarre opinion, one problem is there are no ‘trusted corporations’ left to get reliable information.
For starters, the Bush regime and GOP fascist party has brought our democracy Swift Boat style sliming as part of the political process – for all time. Therefore, it is up to individuals that are not swayed by rhetoric to get supplemental information through the broad reaches of the internet with more and more from non-US sources.
SO. The internet is one of the few remaining “weapons” to combat the new mind beding techniques, like fear, from the new GOP Fascist party.
You can’t have brilliant satire in a sick society.
Sounds like someone else we know. For you young’ens:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski
In the “Unabomber Manifesto”, he argued that his actions were an extreme but necessary tactic to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.
Makes as much sense as taxing carbon energy to force people into preferred technologies and lifestyles.
Great catch. Google this guy and it gets stranger and stranger.
Here is a sample
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2004/scene_horwitt_janfeb04.msp
He is widely sourced as being who he says he is. There are articles on various environmental matters that he wrote or is quoted in. He also appears to have given testimony before congress. If the impersonator was a separate guy the real one has got to be mad.
Possibly he is a plant to make various legal and environmental publications look stupid. Or he is just a silly man.
It is an apt commentary on the loopy-left that this the intention of this OpEd cannot undoubtedly be seen as humorous, notwithstanding the fact that it is laughable.
Of course, this guy is right. Making informed choices and knowing more about the world around you is completely overrated. It would be far better to get all our information from a small number of sources as we had previous to the Internet which of course would never be corrupted, always balanced and always know what information we should have (and what we shouldn’t). ;->
We need a highly educated population to wisely interpret all this information.
Of course, the Republicans have made sure Americans are stupid by de-funding education and trashing the teaching profession at every chance.
That photo is a dead giveaway this is a farce.
Oh PDAs are such a source for information overload aren’t they? Back when people were using them they barely had internet access. No one uses PDAs anymore other than smart phones.
The problem with this guy is he thinks everyone is stupid, and we are just watching TV and using the internet like zombies just absorbing whatever appears on screen, and never questioning or forming our own opinions on whatever the story is about. His opinion of people at large must be very low.
Brilliant.
#10 – GregAllen – …the Republicans have made sure Americans are stupid by de-funding education and trashing the teaching profession at every chance.
And introducing quasi-science such as “Intelligent Design”.
And then you’ve got CNN and Fox News who brings down the average IQ even further.
The only “problem” I see with the Internet is it is conducive to the formation of echo chambers.
@#14: “And introducing quasi-science such as “Intelligent Design”.” … Don’t rush condemning teaching of any varied points of view, no matter how they appear to you. I think that great part of me being a scientist by profession was the fact that I was given resources about many different world views as a child (among many, I was given to read the Bible, Koran , Capital,… together with the popular science books as a school child). Presenting “Intel.Desig.” is an advantage as long as it is not the only viewpoint given…
Now to the insane article… This is the extreme Left view of the world… Elite knows best.
Truthfully, pulling useful information out of the blare that is the internet is like finding that one great novel under a pile of 60% off books in the middle of a bookstore chain.
We at least have the ability to weed out and filter information ourselves; if we didn’t we’d never get anything done during the day.
I think it would be very useful for schools and colleges to teach how to properly weed and filter out bad information from a mass. They concentrate mostly on limiting your intake to particular subjects and individual books. With all the information streaming at us daily it’s tough to limit yourself to one or two ideas.
Taxing everything to infinity for “social cause” doesn’t do much anyway, other than generate revenue and annoy people. If it was a solution, we’d have no smokers right now.
Plus we’d then have John complaining about the interwebitube taxes all day instead of how Microsoft is wasting its advertising money. *shudder*
#1 It is the same Dusty. Woo Hoo! Writer, attorney, Bill Clinton impersonator, singer, songwriter… and he like to shoot hoops too.
http://dustyhorwitt.com/
http://www.ewg.org/about/staff
Fucking nimrod, he is.