While I was walking home from school with a friend earlier in the week she pointed out one of those fliers that are ubiquitously plastered on every pole in the city advertising a screening of a new doc outlining the destruction and appropriation of Iraq.
And to be honest my immediate impression was:
“I don’t really care…”
Now those of you who know me know that I’m as small business, granola crunching, cruelty free wearing, left-winging voting (when I get around to doing it) and nag champa stinking as it gets, but I’ve feel like its a little bit of overkill.
But let me explain myself before someone comes to take my ‘critical mass’ iron-on patch away from me… Basically I question what new things this documentary is going to show me that I haven’t seen in the last four docs, or heard on an NPR radio program, or read on a blog/news feed/journal article? I mean most people get it by now… the war is a sham… it is about the oil… America has cluster fucked the entire Middle East (and I do preface this by admitting there are a lot of very intelligent Americans out there who are deeply upset by what is happening in their name)… and they need to get out before more people die to line another company’s pockets with blood money…
But I guess what I’m getting at is just who are they making these documentaries for?
Is it just to take pot shots at an easy target so you can say you’ve made a ‘critical’ documentary?
I just feel that the market is saturated at this point in time… those who are interested in what is going on are already informed, and have been for a long time… I just don’t see someone standing up at the end of this documentary and going “Oh my God, I didn’t know that was going on in Iraq!!!”
Furthermore, I just don’t see some hyper right-wing conservative turning to his friend and saying “Let’s go see that small screen showing of ‘Blood for Oil’ at the Bloor cinema!” In all fairness I don’t see myself going to a young conservatives screening of… we’ll I’m not sure…
And that’s part of the problem…
We tend to stick to what we know and what makes us secure in our beliefs… granted when I do read the news on something like Google.news, I try to pick three very different view points on the issue (like Al Jezeera, The Christian Science Monitor, and Voice of America) but I definitely don’t do this always, and lately I’ve stuck to left-wing web broadcasts.
All of this convoluted story brings me to the point at hand… Google
Now I love Google… really… for a super monolithic conglomerate I tend to like what they do… they stand tough when they have to and they just recently announced that they will be anonymising all user data 18-24 months after its collected (read here)… but I worry about the effects of their personalized searching… which learns from your searching habits and choices you make and then alters your search to fit your browsing habits.
If this is the future of searching as we know it we’re potentially in for a lot of trouble…
Think of it this way… if you happen to lean towards the left in your choices of pages, then the longer you search the more Google’s going to notice this, and the more its going to bring up search results that cater to your ideal…
“That’s great” you exclaim…
Well… no… not really…
Overtime you will basically be spoon fed exactly what you expect to get, and the results will be polarizing: from the left wing to the right; from Christian fundamentalists to Muslim extremists – individuals will only get information that supports their point of view.
In essence a rapidly expanding self affirming narrowcasting of the Internet… a polarizing and factioning of ideologies… the total disillusion of the middle ground… the slow eventual collapse of openness that is the hallmark of the Internet
The Digital Platonian cave… where only the shadows you see on the screen are real…
March 16, 2007 at 12:54 am |
Well, well, I didn’t know you had a blog…but, on the upside, I don’t think I’m too far behind. I’ll be back!
March 16, 2007 at 2:20 am |
spoon feeding? on the internet? wholly molly…
i always found that randomness was part of the ‘beauty’ of internet searching; the fact that you can be exposed to ideas/thoughts/images, etc. that you never thought of before….so much for that huh?….damn….
March 16, 2007 at 2:31 am |
Ya… well that’s the utopian ideal… but more times than not it seems we do what’s comfortable… I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen… but this notion of ‘narrow casting’ oneself is becoming more and more of a grim reality… especially in some of these community sites… where basically everyone agrees with each other and dissenting voices are shut out by their cloistered democracies – this can be a real problem with the marginal or radical groups I mentioned (think about white supremacists for example)
I think at the same time though you can really goo out and explore new things, but the threat of slipping into a rut is large… and you just have to be mindful of how you surf and the ‘waves’ you ride
March 17, 2007 at 3:50 pm |
I want to be smart like you when I grow up… will you take me under your wing oh saintly one?
I just woke up and my brain is a bit foggy so I will post a legitimate comment on the next one.
*disappears into a puff of logic*