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September, 2009:

Online News – Liability or Asset?

Today I stumbled upon the idea that as we switch more and more towards getting news online, we also get less and less disagreeing or opposing views. This is mainly due to the fact that we can and mostly subscribe to things that interest and mostly agree with our personal views.

I think it is clear that only hearing what we want to hear can isolate us and put us out of touch with what is really going on. This may or may not be bad in itself, but certainly it is not true to say what we don’t know won’t hurt us.

Knowledge is a vital asset as truth is at once needed to properly solve problems.

Just look at elections. Throughout history we vote people into power and then turn around and complain over what they are doing. The missing ingredients is us being involved enough to not only know what is really going on, but to ensure it goes in a direction we want.

We want someone to do the “dirty” work so that we don’t have to. It is easier to pass the buck and hope that some government will care for us, than to make sure things are the way we want them to be.

It has gone so far that Congress is at the lowest approval, possibly in history, certainly in many decades. I think one reason Obama was voted in was because we really wanted an outsider, someone very unlike the last President, in hope that such a person would make good on our inner wishes.

The US was founded in a time where people needed a much higher level of involvement just to stay alive. That threat of imminent death had enough motivation to have a high level of awareness and control of our environment. It was very fortunate that we got such a decent constitution and did not go the way of Tsar Russia or any number of countries not known for their freedoms.

That freedom is also what created the Internet. A free to communicate world where everyone has equal rights.

This new digital world is also a place that can become very automated and require even less involvement by us, with more individuation.

Of course it can also facilitate more and wider range of information. The question is, will you use the Internet to crawl into a hole, or to spread out and seek more knowledge?