Dr. Gary North has very interesting essays, and more interesting when I disagree...
Never in history has there been such an avalanche of information. It is not coordinated by any central institution. Its lack of coordination is the central fact of modern times. The Internet was designed to produce this, and that is what the Internet has produced. The larger the Internet gets, and the more it penetrates into the lives of people around the world, the less possible it is for any one source of information to influence the thinking of all those people who are connected to the Internet.
His conclusion is the internet will benefit free markets because google cannot tell us what to think. here is the problem... there is no more info today that at any other time in history, because people have X amount of info-processing ability. In Roman times, they had brains full of memorized things, their version of google, and they paid attention to stars and omens and even had a government office to study the flight patterns of birds for info.
People are slow to realize that when I get google results and you get google results, we get different google results? Why, google tailors the results to our google patterns. They want to make a buck. The more they know about our searches, the more they tailor our results.
And once they know your predilections, they more they send you info that compliments your predilections. In fact, you are being told what to think. And here is the hard part, most people do not mind, because they have never had the experience of finding joy as a byproduct of suffering. They just want to avoid the pain of thinking for themselves.
Dr. north is making, I think, a common mistake, and that is to think the internet has changed anything. It has lowered the cost and widened access to research and communication. It has done nothing for the quality of the content of either, and to say it will effect our freedom, I don't think so.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
Never in history has there been such an avalanche of information. It is not coordinated by any central institution. Its lack of coordination is the central fact of modern times. The Internet was designed to produce this, and that is what the Internet has produced. The larger the Internet gets, and the more it penetrates into the lives of people around the world, the less possible it is for any one source of information to influence the thinking of all those people who are connected to the Internet.
His conclusion is the internet will benefit free markets because google cannot tell us what to think. here is the problem... there is no more info today that at any other time in history, because people have X amount of info-processing ability. In Roman times, they had brains full of memorized things, their version of google, and they paid attention to stars and omens and even had a government office to study the flight patterns of birds for info.
People are slow to realize that when I get google results and you get google results, we get different google results? Why, google tailors the results to our google patterns. They want to make a buck. The more they know about our searches, the more they tailor our results.
And once they know your predilections, they more they send you info that compliments your predilections. In fact, you are being told what to think. And here is the hard part, most people do not mind, because they have never had the experience of finding joy as a byproduct of suffering. They just want to avoid the pain of thinking for themselves.
Dr. north is making, I think, a common mistake, and that is to think the internet has changed anything. It has lowered the cost and widened access to research and communication. It has done nothing for the quality of the content of either, and to say it will effect our freedom, I don't think so.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
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