Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Repeating History Repeating

After reading Communications and Cyberspace, it appears that we can all agree on that with all of the good of Internet comes plenty of bad. But how is this any different than any other form of media used previously? From cave paintings to oral traditions and from Homer to Guttenburg, it is clear that things change tremendously when more people have more access to information. The difficulty has been how do people know how to choose good information from the bad. So, society over the years have done its best to teach people how to filter. The same goes for the digital age we are now in. Ultimately, we are left with the duty to filter through all of the this information and teach our children how to do it.

2 comments:

mike's spot said...

I think your right John. People always resist new mediums of communication for fear of obsolescences. They try to demon-ize new frontiers because they do not understand them.

Lance Strate said...

Patterns repeat, and it's vital to study history to be able to recognize those patterns and extrapolate where we're headed to. On the other hand, the situation today involves unprecedented access to information, and whatever filters we had available to us have been overwhelmed, if not totally bypassed.