Truth Tellers?
Since this will be my first blog entry, it seems only appropriate to blog about blogging. While writing this (offline), my first observation is that this program (Word) doesn’t even seem to know what a “blog” is (I’m getting red squiggles). Yet this is a medium that has become so enormously powerful…
So the journalists are all up tight about bloggers and how they’re encroaching on their credibility as the sole distributors of truth. To be sure, this is a complex issue which I can not hope to tackle in one entry. Simply put, I believe that we are only better served when more people have a voice. This, obviously, creates a huge problem for many of the deeply entrenched institutions of society. Maybe even for society itself. Soldiers (for example) aren’t supposed to have a “voice,” after all, they’re supposed to shut the F up and follow orders. How can we effectively assert our power in the world if an inconvenient truth enters the collective? What if it were something which might lead some people to comment (in similar entries) that maybe things have gone very wrong? As it turns out (indeed, as we see every day), these institutions with a truth to protect have turned the full force of their instrument to tackling this problem. Main-stream journalism, corporations, governments - have all gone on the offense. How does a military which had been accustomed to opening every letter, eavesdropping on every call, and corralling every media interview respond when soldiers have access to a two megabit broadband connection in the rec. room? Well, at first there’s confusion and chaos: as we see now. It’s doubtless that the Pentagon brass blame such mediums (email, blogs, etc.) as a primary source for all this foul sentiment. We hear over and over that the good news just isn’t getting out. Maybe they’re even deluded enough to believe that bad news pouring out of Iraq is the actual cause of their struggles. For now, they respond by printing more “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers - which sounds like a nice thing but really means shut the F up and follow orders. So what comes after confusion and chaos?: New rules and legislation. The mortar which holds all of these independent thinkers into something called a society.
My concern is that in their efforts to subjugate this relentless chatter, these intuitions will begin to divide up and “refine” corner stones of this “freedom” we are all said to be enjoying. What if new laws begin to carve away at stuff like that first amendment? Shrouded in something like a bill called “the patriot act,” they would begin to define the modes of communication that are actually held to be free. Or who was or was not press. Sure, people have always feared that the sky was falling in this respect (and I realize that this entry is beginning to sound alarmist and angry)… I do worry that it is much easier to plunk some rules down when no one is really looking or really knows what the hell is going on. My mother just learned about Wikipedia today after all. This new wave of mass-mediums does seem to be that kind of an environment – where no one really knows what’s going on. Take the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for example. A sneaky piece of law that was passed before anyone (most people) knew what DRM was. This basically tried to retrofit existing intellectual property laws (for physical items) into the digital domain. It seems to me that what we needed was a complete reworking of what property is.
And then we have these massive multi-player online games with their virtual properties and goods and GDPs equaling small nations… What is a true piece of property? What is a true truth? Who will tell us? Or do we simply have to trust in the democracy of it all and become better, more informed, consumers of things (real or not) and knowledge (true or not). I’m afraid that we all have a lot of learning to do.