The Facts Machine

"And I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide"

Friday, January 31, 2003

INTERNET KILLED THE VIDEO STAR

Jesse from Pandagon points to a study showing that people seem to value the internet more than tv and radiofor purposes of information.
NEW YORK (AP) -- U.S. Internet users consider the information network at least as important as other media, yet they don't necessarily trust what they find online, according to a new study.

About 61 percent find the Net "very" or "extremely" important as an information source, concludes the third annual nationwide survey on the Internet being released Friday from the University of California at Los Angeles.

That's roughly the same as the importance Net users place in books and newspapers. By comparison, just half of them find television important, 40 percent think that of radio and 29 percent of magazines.
This is an interesting issue. A big part of this must have to do with the decline of TV news, particularly our friends at CNN, MSNBC and Faux, this era of "info-tainment" and all. I always have tried to give CNN the benefit of the doubt--they were the last of the 3 cable networks to give in to the flashy bullshit that is so pervasive on the other two--but the Wolf Blitzer-led cheerleading for Gulf War II has been too much for me to take.

I love the internet for information. I love reading weblogs, newspapers from all over the country and world, getting such a diverse range of opinions and information without ever leaving my chair (likely to give me a blood clot, but hey), and being able to access such information 24 hours a day. The internet is great because of the choices it provides (and hey, I'm pro-choice, what can I say), while TV is monstrously streamlined and filtered in its dissemination of 411.

The internet is still finding its equilibrium in human life, and huge numbers of people around the world have never seen it nor have ever had regular access to it. This, of course, opens up a larger debate about whether forcibly plugging other parts of the world into the system (whether it's the internet, or the global economy, etc) is a worthy idea. Certainly it violates the prime directive, hehe. Or of course, one could be creative in how they act with the rest of the world, as evidenced by Bush's SOtU speech: hmm, 15 billion for African AIDS, but no condoms? Stuff like that.

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