Monday, 19 September 2011

Push-button publishing

Is a dangerous thing.

We have the power to broadcast anything and everything to the world at the click of a button, but how much thought goes into something that anyone, anywhere can see and be affected by? How much does that promote a fire-and-forget kind of media culture where consequence and responsibility, even personal restraint comes second to whatever it is one might want to say, no matter how insignificant?

Printing, publishing used to be a laborious, time-consuming process; a barrier to the spread of knowledge.

But not everything in your head is knowledge. A lot of it is trash, and there's a lot more of it floating around right now than ever before.

2 comments:

  1. Good questions raised in this little post - deep questions actually. It is indeed far too easy to publicize worthless or trivial information.

    Another scary issue to consider is the amount of misinformation and propaganda are put out there for our consideration.

    To me these are plain facts that define cyberspace. Further, what bit suggests to me is that there is a great need for information consumers (you, me and everyone else) to be able to analyze the information with critical thinking

    My hope in teaching such a class as this would be that all of us further develop the ability to discern the useful from the useless and the authentic from the bogus.

    Time will tell, I guess.

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  2. It definitely exaggerates the good and bad points of information dissemination. An example of the good probably being (most of) Wikipedia, and the bad sites like 4Chan and certain Forums/chat boards.

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