then maybe yes.

Otherwise NO!

Speaking about films,

as Klaatu points out in

The Day the Earth Stood Still,

our time is up.

Love in Peace,

XXXOOO

No harm no foul.

Plato said civilizations go through cycles.

Democracy is the second to last stage, and it is marked by a wide diversification of consensus. Everyone starts to believe in a personal reality that has no connection to nature, physics, common sense, etc.

So you get one distinct opinion for every person, and there's no agreement at all except on the need for commerce, so civilization decays into anarchy and then its behind-the-scenes financial oligarchs unite and appoint a tyrant to keep order.

At that point, it has reached third-world status, as both Greece and Rome did after they fell.

That's your future, industrialized West, and all these people spinning you positive futures are just trying to hoard up enough gold to escape.

wrote: Democracy is the second to last stage, and it is marked by a wide diversification of consensus.

Well, that is not where we are. Much of the population believes exactly as Fox news tells them to. And most of the rest follow a somewhat less extreme model.

It does put time-wasting stupidity on display, but I doubt that there is any more stupidity than before. Probably there is less; it really is possible to learn a lot.

... "the same as it ever was."

Do you think all those new blogs get read? Readership and usefulness determine what sites rise to the top.

Does anyone think the internet has increased worker productivity? How many hours are spent surfing or shopping during working hours by mid-level administrators in isolated cubicles? What about all that e-commerce on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Does anyone believe shoppers are doing this from home? On a related note, the most popular on line businesses are Porn and Gambling. What a revolution! I need to get back to work.....

The internet is a tool of tyranny, oppression and fear. Whether that's a good thing or not is a separate question. The internet is the world's greatest feedback loop. It serves to amplify the idiot angry opinions you already hold until they become unassailable gospel. It's not making us stupid, we ARE stupid. It's making us self righteous about being stupid.

Lived in a tightly enclosed cupboard...

Eating his curds and whey.

The Cyber Skeptics sound like elitist assholes and fascists. Yes the world is evolving because of the intenet, and they want to go back to 3 television networks and a handful of news services telling what to think about everything?

The internet has produced the democratization of opinions, not all informed, rarely in agreement, but thats the price of freedom. Not everything you hear will be sanctioned by Maureen Dowd or the CIA. Freedom of expression. Deal with it.

I came syncrhonistically upon Mr. Brin's article just after finishing his book "Earth," a futuristic vision that holds up reasonably well after nearly 20 years. His best idea in both pieces is that we will succeed to the extent we emulate Walt Whitman's notion that each of us contains multitudes.

The Internet and other high tech may indeed help us move in that direction. And I suspect Brin's right in that the only way to rationalize the inherent chaos of the current Internet is by letting it evolve naturally along market lines.

However, we must not forget Mr. Gresham's law, namely that in financial markets (as we have just seen, in spades) bad money drives out good. In the Internet market of ideas, it seems to me all too likely that bad ideas will drive out the good ones. Without mediation of some kind, that is. This comment is one additional, small act of such mediation.

Ya see! Ya see! Your stupid minds...Stupid! Stupid!

They saved Hitler's brain!

They bring it out for public display

On the History Channel

Every now and again...

I used to be able to do simple head math, then calculators came along. Head math? Gone!! But now I never make stupid math mistakes and my check book always balances.

I love my Google. I love my Wiki. I have drunk the Kool-aid!

I wouldn't have read the article if it weren't for the Internets.It probably wouldn't have been published if it weren't for the Internets.

Unless the next generation's eyeballs grow differenly, or their brains develop new clumps of brain, I don't think that we're in danger of any physical evolution.

Journalism, however, has evolved. It's become a mess of stream-of-conscious nonsense, with no attention whatsoever to the pyramid format, and attention to the who, what, when, where,and why presented in an order where the important information can be parsed out in less than 40 minutes.

In other words, thanks to the Internets, we people have taken over journalism's bizarrely self-appointed role of being the "final arbiter" of deciding what it is that we need to know. There's a form of social evolution that I applaud!

"The Marching Morons" was just Kornbluth. "Search the Skies" is an example of a Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration with the de-evolution theme in it.

"Television is reality...and reality is less than television"

- Doctor Brian Oblivion

LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!

Is this a pointless concept, as more and more internet babblers create their own grammatical, syntactical, and other "rules of English" universes? Is it a conscious writing style, to accentuate issues the [author] wants to emphasize, or just laziness, to avoid editing and rewriting, which takes away time that could be used to expel every thought, because every possible thought must be provided to every reader? Two concepts seem to be missing from this discussion: 1] reflection, which [used to] mean taking real time to simply sit and think, and 2] the value of face-to-face interaction, where more than the printed word is used to comprehend our fellow human beings. Hey, thanks for the chance to babble!

EVOLUTION = state of Affairs + Knowledgeable plan - Setbacks.

The Web increases affairs (discourse), improves knowing (Wiki) and makes us far more aware of potential setbacks (criticisms).

PLEASE HIT RESET BUTTON TO RESUSCITATE THINKING SANS CYNI-SCHISM.

Crichton was right, Andromeda Strain, about humanity's plight. If our netCommune fails to develop any resources to deal with setbacks, then nature will have her way with us. I have been introduced to Nature, and she is one great bitch of a fiery decisionmaker, relying upon a history and plot that easily extend beyond the skill of any single human - but perhaps not so out of reach of an impending future where people construct a universal civilization determined to exist.

Global warming, tyrants, murderers and pandemics will be held at bay by the evolutionary selection of useful, simple fixes. One step at a time: Darwin observed and believed this to be so. How large each step? Well, that is simply a matter of talk on the web, unbelievably huge transformations in only one generation totally anti-Darwinian in scale, and of course the usual eruptions around and about the village.

Let's not get upset by terrorists or tsunamis - we have always recovered sufficient to develop the Next Step. Discussion may inadvertantly lead to discovery, thus justifying all the waste on the web - as well as offline where killing time, defeating justice, casting fate to the wind and so on.. recur randomly. Human culture promotes it all. Amen.