An Info World
By Mr JM
I was browsing a site I visit occasionally and I ran across a link to youtube that seemed interesting. One of the problems I’ve seen with television has been the way what might have been a superb educational tool has been subverted into an entrapment machine, spewing out specially designed traps to hold the attention, to reduce the amount of thought and to lull us into being contented couch potatoes.
And to be honest, I don’t think the powers-that-be have too much interest in our contentment – as far as they are concerned, keeping us trapped on the couch is good enough.
The constant watching of TV allows us to be programmed and controlled on levels never before seen. Our individuality is reduced, our creativity dies and we become lazy thinkers.
The personal computer helped change this a little – computing required thought, it needed the involvement of the user and, at least in the initial stages, without creativity it was a boring pastime.
But I’ve seen the TV attitudes coming onto the net – to paraphrase, ninety percent of everything is junk, and the internet is getting close to, if not exceeding that level. It provides a medium that, just like TV, eats up time with little practical or creative result.
There’s a lot of junk data on the internet and not a lot of people these days get educated in how to spot the difference between real and useful information and somebody’s propaganda or nonsense presented as fact. And the idea of research is too much like hard work for a lot of folk.
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