> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Marvin Long, Jr.
> Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 8:17 AM
...
> > He laments the fact that the Internet is unfiltered, but
> doesn't suggest who
> > should be filtering it. Of course, if he did, his elitism
> would be blatant.
>
> I don't see how you read this into the article. Never once does he say
> the 'net should be filtered, and he spends as much time talking about
> satellite TV as he does the 'net.
He's saying that it's a bad thing that people are exposed to the unfiltered
net. Isn't that a call for filtering? It doesn't even really make sense,
as the people who carry information from the net to those without net access
are inevitably filtering -- they couldn't possibly make everything
available. So this comes down to who does the filtering.
> And yet Friedman's point is that when only a tiny part of the population
> is literate and wired, they have enormous power to misinform the masses to
> promote their own secular and religious agendas...just like the pope five
> hundred years ago.
I don't think you have the appropriate parallel. The Church was the
information elite of its day, in parallel to today's mass media,
representing a miniscule percentage of the population, incomparable to the 5
percent of the Indonesian population that is now wired. The apt comparison
for them is to the literate population in Europe at the printing revolution.
> It seems to me that Friedman is basically repeating
> the truism that with mass media 90 (maybe 99) percent of everything is
> crap. The problem is when 90+ percent of the people don't have access
> to the tools, learning, and experience needed to "filter" that crap
> out on their own.
I didn't get that at all. Seems unlikely, in fact, considering where his
words appeared. It seemed to me that he was criticizing the 5 percent for
supposedly spreading disruptive (mis)information.
Nick
