Remember in the '50s how we all worried about someone's finger hovering over the 'war button' and a simple hiccup or a sneeze launching us into war once more? The panic button that would send a bomb off to decimate another land?
It's a whole lot more likely to happen now with our busy little fingers having access to the world as we're able to reach across the globe and tempers flare. If you were fearful of one panic button, think about billions of buttons being out there! It's called "the keyboard".
On the other hand, - if you'll allow me that pun - we also have the capacity to stop it. To not allow others to fully control our thoughts any longer. Using intelligence and wisdom from history, we can make our government truly ours. As it was meant to be.
History will show that the greatest single mistake the Bush war machine made was to underestimate the impact of the Internet. They didn't understand the Internet or the Internet culture, its sociology, and most important, how access to the Internet transformed Americans from mere accepters of broadcast information into active and critical participants in the information process. They waved off Internet news sources as just hobbies run by computer geeks for other computer geeks to tap into. Nothing to worry about! Blogs were not mainstream media, we were told by mainstream media.
Bush and the NeoCons didn't really know what to do about the Internet anyway, so wishful thinking made it unimportant. That was their critical error, because while the polls kept showing more people were still getting their news from TV than from their computers, the margin kept getting smaller.
And their polls didn't reflect the fact that those people watching TV news were not as mentally involved with the information flow as Internet users are. While fewer in numbers, people who were getting their news from the Internet were more involved with the news they gathered — after all they sought it out and they talked with others they knew who did not have Internet feeds. "Each one teach one" thrives in practice.
Article comments
1 - outlawdba
I fully agree and great insight still recognizing W's base actually does get their "news" strictly from the propaganda machine, NASCAR, and talking directly with god (and for a few years that proved to be annoying).
2 - Matt Ellsworth
Interesting thoughts - when I saw the title I immediately thought of this video that I saw about the evolution of the internet etc.
3 - Ginger Haycox
Matt;
Me too! In fact, if you go back up in my post & click on "the keyboard", you will see that the video was my inspiration for writing my post. =)