Internet as television

Television is a medium whereby data is sent from a few central points to a multitude of receiving machines. The reader may judge for him/her/itself, but people on the receiving side are often characterized as passive, mindless consumers.

The internet is a set of computers which use a standardized communication method to exchange data. Any computer on the network can address every other computer, and serve or receive data with its peers. There are some standards as to how that data gets shunted around, but the flow of data is basically arbitrary.

Now, the reader's experience with the internet is probably more like the definition of television than the definition of internet. You go to a website like nytimes.com or salon.com or hornywetmidgets.com and information is beamed in to your house, and you consume that information. Oh, you can use the Net like the mail to send one-to-one emails, and many web sites do have interactive details such as the `add to cart' button, but the flow of information is basically one way.

There are many forces out there trying to keep it as much like TV as possible. The majority of digital-protection schemes which protect the members of the RIAA and the MPAA will have the side-effect of making the Net more like TV. For example, the peer-to-peer networks that we read about in the news every day exactly fit the internet definition above. A site such as itunes.com, where you can download music that they put out for you, is a closer fit to the above definition of television.

But I digress. In Internetland, everybody can be a content provider to everybody else. Those who think this is how it should be can all have a blog.

Nice, democratic people that we are, we like to think that everybody should have a voice, all the time. But that one isn't entirely obvious. It's like libertarianism: hoardes of free marketeers insist that the world would be a better place with zero regulation, but such a state has never, ever existed. [As a reply, a few thousand libertarians are trying to make one.] Equal access to public media has also never existed.

And the truth is, that if you give everybody a chance to talk, most of them will, indeed, talk about the completely banal, idiotic, or vaguely offensive. [I'd give examples, but how to cull it down?] So you get people who complain about the bloggers, saying that the Net is filled with blog noise from self-appointed experts such as this arse.

But people are really good at filtering dumb content. Yeah, they still think Fox News is Fair and Balanced (tm), but I expect that even that facade has been cracked, as they keep suing other content providers who parody them, such as Fox Broadcasting. [Ex post note: this lawsuit was just a joke by Matt Groening. But I'm leaving the darn links.] Or to give an example on the other end of the production spectrum, most people, when happening upon a Chick publication lying around, will successfully gather the clues and work out that this is the work of a crackpot.

Despite the innovative features, online readily follows traditional media this way. I have full faith in the abilities of those who stumble upon this to realize that even though I'm a world authority on the application of Bayesian updating to models of simultaneous conviviality, that doesn't give me the slightest license to blather endlessly on why Jack Snow is annoying.

More meta: With that in mind, I've submitted the site to Google, which I count as the blog going live, as complete strangers will now stumble upon this work and be forced to work out whether it's worth reading or not. We'll see where it goes. [By its own purchases, Google seems OK with blogs, by the way.]

I have to admit that most of what I look for in web sites myself is the TV-like sort of thing, wherein I watch words come up and look at them while I'm eating. Y'know, sentences that you don't have to read all the way through because you have something to click on in the middle of each of them. I guess that's what I'm providing, and that's OK.

Despite my lack of authority, you're hopefully finding some entertainment value in these pontifications. One reader suggested that I shoot for something more personal and less beat-you-about-the-head-and-neck witty, but it's sorta hard to put personal content here. A simple `I still think about `Lissa Tom a lot' would probably deeply disturb some subset of the world's population. I certainly don't want to end up like these characters.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of this document, the reader will note that I'm only updating on even-numbered days, thus saving the reader the endless torment of hitting over and over again on at least the odd-numbered days. See, I really do care.