from Dave Pollard:
[excerpt]
Are you watching, listening to and reading the news in the mainstream media and just finding it all inane, meaningless? Do the things they tell you are important mean nothing to you? Perhaps you're too far ahead of them.
This shouldn't be surprising. We've all observed how the "digital (technology) divide" has widened to a chasm. A small group, maybe 5-20% of the population, now uses the Internet instead of the TV, radio, newspapers and magazines as their source of both information and entertainment. That group has grown more and more sophisticated in the use of Internet and similar information and communication technologies, and are now more vastly informed, more able to get the information they want when they want it, and more connected with others all over the world. Meanwhile, the other 80-95% of the population, including the majority of young people, is stuck at the starting gate. They have no clue how to use these tools effectively, and as the tools get more advanced and dependent on an understanding of earlier tools, the chances dim that they will ever cross the digital divide, which just gets wider and wider.
The same phenomenon is happening, I think, with information. Those of us who have learned to use these tools effectively are vastly more informed than the majority still relying on mass media sound bites and press releases. So what's happening now is that the mainstream media are effectively speaking a completely different language from that those of us on the other side of the "digital (information) divide" have learned to speak and understand. It is as if the mass media audience is still learning and listening to nursery rhymes, while the rest of us have learned not only to appreciate finely crafted music, symphonies, and international styles of music, but, through participation, have learned to compose and perform it as well. No surprise then, that when we watch and read and listen to the mainstream media we are appalled by their dumbed-down, absurdly oversimplified dichotomies -- good vs bad, right vs wrong, left vs right, and at how easily they are distracted from what's important by what's 'entertaining'. Ooh, look, that politician mommy has a baby, and a baby having a baby!
onward
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