Name: Anonymous 2013-02-08 18:10
It's really amusing to go back and read 1990s punditry about how the "information superhighway" was going to facilitate all of this honest, unfettered communication, and in so doing break down teh barriers of nationalism, racism, jingoism, and so on. The exact opposite has happened. The Internet is to catty, sorority-style gossip as nitrous oxide is to a gasoline engine, and the level of real, honest communication between people has only suffered from its rise to prominence.
There's no open communication... instead, we have even more fractious little clubs than before. We have a club for anonymous pedophiles (4Chan), a club for anti-American militant atheists (Reddit), a club for know-it-all manual-readers (Stack Overflow), and a club for hand-wringing slaves to convention, suburban Dallas-style (WorseThanFailure.com). And each of these has about as much tolerance for dissent as Mao Tse Tung's second wife during a heavy menstrual cycle.
There's no open communication... instead, we have even more fractious little clubs than before. We have a club for anonymous pedophiles (4Chan), a club for anti-American militant atheists (Reddit), a club for know-it-all manual-readers (Stack Overflow), and a club for hand-wringing slaves to convention, suburban Dallas-style (WorseThanFailure.com). And each of these has about as much tolerance for dissent as Mao Tse Tung's second wife during a heavy menstrual cycle.