The Knows and Know-Nots?
May. 4th, 2006 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaSo.
The most wonderful thing ever happened Saturday at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and no one knows about it.
No one in the real world, anyway. The internet has been abuzz for the last couple days, but only in certain circles.
(And there, it turned into that special kind of partisan sniping that makes you doubt your own sanity. Although I was pleased to see that the Thank You site was at a thousand by Tuesday morning, and well over thirty thousand by Wednesday morning.)
I've been mentioning it for the past week in school, and have thus far met a sum total of one person who knows what I'm talking about.
Anyway, everyone remember the whole 'haves and have nots' thing that used to get brought up every now and again about those who have technology, and those who don't, and how it's a social divide?
Okay, how about something a little more obscure - tracking the real-world transmission of information throughout, say, a school? The basic gist of it is that the better connected find out first, and it trickles down through various channels until it reaches the final, least connected kids. I remember saying when I first heard about this (when I was in fifth or six grade) that it wasn't quite like that - some of the social circles didn't have any bridges, so information would be transmitted only so far before it hit the end, leaving a group discussing it and a group unaware.
What I've seen a lot is now is that the internet is big enough for various social circles to function completely independently. There are those who get their news from the internet, and those who use the internet to talk with friends. As the number increases, the chance of having completely insular groups - a circle of friends who all only use the internet to talk to each other, say - increases. In addition, as the number of things to do online increases, people are more likely to be sidetracked into their particular subgenre of interests.
Basically, we've reached a world where the sheer volume of information is so distracting people don't even know when the president of the United States gets insulted for twenty glorious minutes by a guy standing five feet away on national television.
Which, if you think about it, is a horrible, horrible shame.
The most wonderful thing ever happened Saturday at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and no one knows about it.
No one in the real world, anyway. The internet has been abuzz for the last couple days, but only in certain circles.
(And there, it turned into that special kind of partisan sniping that makes you doubt your own sanity. Although I was pleased to see that the Thank You site was at a thousand by Tuesday morning, and well over thirty thousand by Wednesday morning.)
I've been mentioning it for the past week in school, and have thus far met a sum total of one person who knows what I'm talking about.
Anyway, everyone remember the whole 'haves and have nots' thing that used to get brought up every now and again about those who have technology, and those who don't, and how it's a social divide?
Okay, how about something a little more obscure - tracking the real-world transmission of information throughout, say, a school? The basic gist of it is that the better connected find out first, and it trickles down through various channels until it reaches the final, least connected kids. I remember saying when I first heard about this (when I was in fifth or six grade) that it wasn't quite like that - some of the social circles didn't have any bridges, so information would be transmitted only so far before it hit the end, leaving a group discussing it and a group unaware.
What I've seen a lot is now is that the internet is big enough for various social circles to function completely independently. There are those who get their news from the internet, and those who use the internet to talk with friends. As the number increases, the chance of having completely insular groups - a circle of friends who all only use the internet to talk to each other, say - increases. In addition, as the number of things to do online increases, people are more likely to be sidetracked into their particular subgenre of interests.
Basically, we've reached a world where the sheer volume of information is so distracting people don't even know when the president of the United States gets insulted for twenty glorious minutes by a guy standing five feet away on national television.
Which, if you think about it, is a horrible, horrible shame.
