Wednesday, December 15, 2004
astronomy picture of the day rss
screen page scraped, but i'm glad somebody did it. i'm thinkng this may go on my home page permanently (rss).
filtering? book burning? censorship?
interesting list at Orange as Philosophy: Banned Books. but what's the “ALA” 1 ?
which brings to mind other recent book / media / information news:
how does library management science address censorship issues, and/or less formal social or cultural impacts on information sources ? 2
at what point does “filtering“ become a sort of individualized virtual book burning ? but we (as a species) have always done some version of that. in fact, so has all life. and it's even built into physical laws (locality via finite speed of light, among other things).
i'm also starting to feel just a tad bit leery about one source of information becoming dominant. google everywhere ? i get a similar (but much stronger) feeling when i think about u.s. intelligence (;-)) being brought under a single umbrella agency. no danger, you say ? well, how much of the internet (blogs, news, whatever) is simply information passed on from other sources ? more “filtering“. but the originating sources remain few.
and if you'll notice, i'm using a lot of cnn links lately. it's all in the streets we travel. but “choice” is just a manifestation of accumulated stimuli / response. nodes of (relative) complexity.
in any milieu, what people accept is simply a matter of their accustomed worldview. that's not as circular as it seems. one cannot object to what one is not aware of. there may some discomfort, but we are trained to find some discomforts acceptable, while others are not. “discomfort”. dissonances. from these conflicts - internal or external - arise change, motivation, dynamicism. the odd part is that we strive for complete consonance. if that were achieved, it would be worse than orwellian double-think - we will have achieved “single-think”.
my instincts are like most others, i like my comfort zone, and i only want that to improve. “improve”, i should say. the quotes are important. comfort, by the way, includes one's accustomed risk taking, etc. i don't mean something like a padded cell in the traditional sense. but it is equivalent.
counter to these natural instincts, becoming too successful at comfort leads to a kind of happy-happy joy-joy near death, a self-induced cultural soma. intellectually, it is clear that the optimal growth environment is one on the boundary between chaos and stasis. a common theme, that.
and so it goes with books and information as well. and democracy. complete acceptance of all lifestyles may actually be counter productive - taken in isolation. but there are sufficient other conflicts to keep us on our toes indefinitely. thankfully.
update: have to, have to, have to add this: Robot Exclusion Protocol