I remember my first time very well.
It was 1993; a friend had allowed me to use his unbelievably powerful Pentium-based computer (mine at home was merely an 8088...sigh!)
I sat nervously in front of the keyboard, a cyber-virgin about to be initiated into a whole new experience. I "clicked" and then waited...and then, there it was, in glorious black-on-white Hypertext Markup Language: the Internet! I was surfing the World Wide Web -- such as it was in those days.
This was pre-Mosaic, pre-Netscape, pre-Explorer or Firefox or even Google. Literally, all you could get was a page full of WORDS (imagine that!) with little underlined sections that would "link" you to another set of words on another computer somewhere else in the world. But, my God, it was glorious!
I sat there and talked to Switzerland that first night, and I knew that I was never going to be the same!
Now back in 1993, nobody was worried about whether or not Al Gore "invented" the Internet; hardly anybody had email and IM's were not even dreamed of. Facebook was not possible, because you couldn't see any pictures on the screen-- much less anybody's face.
But, a world-shaking, life-changing phenomenon had come to be in those days: the Internet was born and it was here to stay! Who knew that less than 20 years later, the Internet would be well on its way to becoming our #1 source for entertainment, financial strategy, news and social networking?
After all, if it's on the Internet, it must be true!
Evan Thomas is a writer...the old fashioned kind that puts words on paper for a living. He has written for Newsweek magazine since 1977. But, so that you'll believe what he says has some validity, let me point out that his words are now also distributed on the Internet via the Newsweek website. (Yes, that's my tongue planted firmly in my cheek!)
Thomas wrote this week about "The Deepest Dangers Facing the United States." You might think that, in this age of what's-sensational-is-what-gets-heard-or-read, he would be writing about the latest terrorist threat, or some diabolical plot on the part of __________ (insert name of the political party or government entity you most revile here) -- or possibly yet another diatribe concerning the myth/truth of global warming, blah blah blah.
But, no...Thomas has written a gentle, thoughtful article about the information overload that we are subjected to in 21st-century USAmerica.
We are a nation founded on freedom, above all else, and we like to have our choices. Nowhere is this more true than in the information arena. We can "know" whatever we want to know, even if we're not supposed to know it (thanks to Julian Assange and other freedom of information pirates!)
Here's the crux of what Evan Thomas says in his article; read it and think about it just for a moment:
In an atmosphere of fear and envy, rumors and conspiracy theories spread fast. It’s easy for regular people to suspect the game is rigged against them by the insiders in New York and Washington—the Wall Streeters and the political and media elites. Cable-TV and talk-radio personalities and bloggers have risen up to speak for the people. But as they pander for clicks and ratings, their standards of factual accuracy are often low....
More information, from more sources, should have liberated the marketplace of ideas. Open, free, unfettered speech has usually served to expose the abuses of power.... But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.
There is more noise and more opinion—but arguably not in the cause of truth. Untruths and gross distortions swirl around the Internet, supercharged by the cable-TV bias for hyperconflict....
With too much unmediated information to choose from, people select what they wish to believe....
American voters ...can usually... smell out phonies and crooks, the power-mad and the truly venal. But they need some factual basis for their opinions, and the “facts” they read on the Internet or see on TV or hear on talk radio are increasingly unreliable.
It is true that the establishment press in the “good old days” shared a liberal bias, and that some of the right-wing talkers meet a need for conservative opinions to be heard. But as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
(emphasis mine; read the entire article here. Thanks to my friend, Joey Graves, for pointing me to the article originally.)
I guess what I really want to say is, I think Mr. Thomas makes a valid point and I'm sure that he must be right about this.
After all, I heard it on the Internet.
