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by KerrAvon
1482 days ago
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I like Cliff Stoll and I’m really far from being an internet booster, but that’s incorrect on the face of it. Every website has one or more editors, including this one. And every newsblog _is_ a filter. It’s your choice which ones to follow. There is infinite data available to you and infinite ways to consume it. You — essentially anybody — can take an entire degree curriculum taught by top professors online for a ton of subjects if you don’t care about getting credit toward a degree. That degree of democratization of knowledge was absolutely unfathomable in the mid-20th century, when Stoll was likely born. It’s important not to let Facebook and Twitter and the dark side of things completely obscure your vision. |
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But online spaces have some kind of free-for-all area, & it's usually a shit show. I have a pretty good, sharp, caring, concerned set of friends on Facebook, it's actually pretty ok, but I definitely see plenty of others with just madcap bedlam in their feeds all the time. Most sites have comments, and even here where it's pretty good, I feel like 20% are actively misleading, are concealing & have a non-straightforward agenda they're pushing.
There's a duality right? Good and the bad? There's plenty of amazingness. But we allow & celebrate interaction, it's an interactive medium, and so much of the activity comes from a shouting class, from borderline lunatics, from warped concerns. I absolutely celebrate the good, I love Twitter dearly (though I've been away for a long time), but there's so little guiderails & helpers, it takes such a mature mindset to navigate & orient oneself amid the seas of so much teaming noise & din.
And we haven't really made gains in taming the wild. There's kind of still this dual, of high tower work, and the mass spaces. What younger me was expecting was that we'd refine & build better visibility, so we could be more enlightened & better understand what we ran across, collectively, wherever we went. There's been little progress in layering in context. The shouting has gone up.