Saturday, June 11, 2016

The Internet is an Ever-Growing Global Brain Overwhelming the Tiny Shrinking Brains of the Talking Heads

Machines are amplifiers - Cooper's Law

I sometimes wonder if Trump has gone as far as he has, politically, because of the Internet. If true, without the Internet we would have had another corrupt, lying politician as President.

I consider the Internet to be an ever-growing global brain. I also consider the Talking Heads/Chattering Classes to now be irrelevant, made insignificant by the rise of the Internet. And it's driving them crazy.

I have a degree in Journalism and for years was a reporter, then newspaper editor. Out of the five bosses I had, all were incompetent except one. The three newspapers I worked for are all out of business. Newspapers for the past several years have been dropping like flies. I predicted it. With that many incompetent people businesses cannot survive.

Every time I watch political news it's always about the End of Trump, how he's shot himself in the foot and then stuck it in his mouth. But they've been wrong about him from the beginning.

My experience with journalists, starting in college, is that most of them aren't very smart or knowledgeable. They always think they're right and those who disagree them aren't merely mistaken, but positively evil.

The Internet is the most direct of democracies. Everyone has an equal say. The "elite" doesn't like that at all. People are supposed to listen to their opinions and vote as they direct. All they can do now is point-and-sputter furiously. People are ignoring them and bypassing them and forming their own opinions.

The media is trying to portray Trump as an unstable clown with his finger on the nuclear trigger. This isn't the first time they've tried this. Reagan was supposedly a senile old fool with his finger on the same button and he was supposed to lose to the inept Carter in landslide. And before that, Barry Goldwater (there was a famous commercial at that time of a little girl playing with daisies and then boom! a mushroom cloud - that cloud courtesy of Goldwater).

The media is such a joke that if Trump was running as a democrat they'd claim he was America's savior. They thought Johnson was wonderful even though he really did turn out to be a warmonger and they hated Nixon so much (because he was a Republican) they did everything they could to destroy him (and finally did).

I live in the Real America. Flyover Land. The Midwest. I pay no attention to the Fake America - the East Coast mass media. They really think people listen to them and if they keep repeating Trump is hated by women and "Hispanics" (whatever they are) then people will desert him by the tens of millions. Which isn't going to happen.

I stopped watching the news decades ago. The only reason I watch today is to watch the hysterical and ineffective attacks on Trump. For me it's a form of entertainment, to watch them sputter and froth.

I can't remember the last time I read a paper version of a newspaper. I rarely read them on the Internet. Mostly I read the headlines and if it catches my attention I'll read the story.

The more the paper versions of newspapers go under the better it is for the country. And they did it to themselves, not that they know it. And it wouldn't have happened if they had bothered to tell the truth instead of nonsense.

I can't predict the future, but is sure looks are if they Internet is going to keep growing the printed lies are going to keep going under.

That's fine with me.

8 comments:

sth_txs said...

I'm certainly grateful for Al Gore's invention of this internet. It certainly would have been harder to dissect the fraud of the system here. I remember in the late 80's for debate competition in highschool being limited to Time, Newsweek, the major national and local newspapers. Pretty lame in retrospect.

Unknown said...

I turned my TV off when I was 16. I realized at that time TV was more of a distraction and just noise.

Anonymous said...

What is a journalist, after all? A person who keeps a journal.

The "freedom of the press" does not mean that there is this thing, this organisation named "the press" and that it must be "free". Rather, it is the freedom of every citizen to "press", to print an publish their opinions. No matter how seditious or stupid.

And that promise is beginning to be realized - good and bad. Today's political blog is simply yesterday's printed out handbill, made better with technology.

Today, the newspapers. Tomorrow, the universities. Come to think of it, I'm a day behind.

Twarog said...

"Newspapers for the past several years have been dropping like flies. I predicted it. With that many incompetent people businesses cannot survive."

I had a close relative who was a high-ranking editor at a big-city paper for decades. By the time he left, a few years ago, he said there were six empty desks on either side of him. It was like a ghost town. Another friend of mine is still a reporter, trying to get a better job in journalism than the one he has. He says that of every fifteen job applications he submits, he gets maybe one response, if he's lucky. He also said that, when he first tried to break into the business, every job he applied for ended up going to an editor's barely-literate nephew, instead of somebody who actually knew how to write clear English.

The Night Wind said...

They've actually become so irrelevant that there was an international conference in Moscow last week discussing "The End of Mainstream Journalism" and how emerging countries' mass-media systems could better work with the Internet to bypass the MSM:

http://nightwind777.blogspot.com/2016/06/international-efforts-grow-against.html

Unknown said...

" Rather, it is the freedom of every citizen to "press", to print an publish their opinions. No matter how seditious or stupid."

Yeah I never understood these people who claim that the "press" is an organization. Moreover, I never understood these people who wanted the government to determine who is the press and who isn't. And these are the same people who think the press should be licensed.

"Today, the newspapers. Tomorrow, the universities."

I think a lot of these universities need to go. With the advent of the Internet, there is no reason for these college majors to sit in a class room where a teacher just regurgitates the shit you spent the prior week reading on your own. Colleges these days are really nothing more than glorified baby sitting institutions.

Farm Boy said...

Well stated Bob! When I see someone reading a hard copy of a newspaper, esp if it is the Washington Compost or New York Slimes, I conclude immediately that he or she is an absolute moron.

Robert What? said...

The "press" - which have gone somnambulant under Obama - will suddenly "wake up" under a Trump Presidency. Do they think they have any credibility left at all?