Eric, 

I really appreciate many of your insights because you are clearly a 
talented student of the nuts and bolts of mass media.  

But I don't think you understand the power of the internet, as of yet.  
You keep wanting to compare it to something you can grasp in terms of 
your knowledge of mass media.  Something like the VCR or talk radio.  

Yet, the internet is a profoundly new medium that is completely different 
from anything produced by the telecommunications industries.  

I submit that the internet is the primary contribution of the 20th Century 
scientific community to the on-going formation of social and political 
institutions.  

Over the course of the 20th Century scientific investigation has had to 
overcome a hubristic quest for an Absolute answer to the mysteries of 
the universe in favor of a much more humble effort to investigate any 
number of truths deemed pertinent by practitioners within a given 
discipline.  In the wake of, among other things, the atom bomb, scientists 
have, by necessity, had to reckon with the limitations of human knowledge and 
create a dialogical process in which observation is submitted to a rigorous 
process of verification by the community of scientists in that field.  
Scientists, in other words, have had to admit to human fallibility and 
build such an admission into the scientific procedure.  

Unfortunately the institutions raised on the basis of the Marxist 
"science" of dialectical materialism and the Capitalist "science" of 
laissez faire economics have not been forced to submit themselves to a 
close investigation of their equally hubristic confidence in their Correct 
answers to Ultimate questions.  Well, we have seen what happened to the 
institutions built on the Marxist "science" of dialectical materialism.  To 
say the least, I think it is quite clear that a large amount of hubris built 
into the very foundations of our social and political institutions is 
quite dangerous. 

The Internet, on the other hand, was created by micro-biologists, chemists, 
physicists, mathematicians, evolutionary psychologists, developmental 
geneticists, etc., to aid them in the processes of investigating, within 
strictly delineated boundaries, a variety of truths that could, then, be put 
into use in the world.  This sphere of open of communication proved to be so 
successful in the scientific community that more and more individuals in
more and more disciplines chose to use it and develop it, making it ever more 
accessible.  

Well, now it has been made so accessible that it will impact upon all 
human societal and political institutions.

We aren't talking about another tool created by a telecommuncations 
company to reap a profit. 

We're talking about a central tool designed to assist the most rigorous 
acolytes devoted to human-kinds on-going quest for meaning.  We're talking 
about equipment designed by folks who understand the limitations of isolated 
man in seeking an unrealizable Absolute.  We're talking about folks who have 
striven for a way to communicate with each other and hold to account 
whatever limited truths they could discover in a world in which 
Reason is fallible.  

This stuff, if you can get my drift, is designed to cleave right through the 
deficiencies of whatever Absolute Marxism or Capitalism or any other ism 
puts in the way.


 --
G Scott Aikens				01223-571-170
Dept of Social and Political Sciences	gsa1001@cus.cam.ac.uk
The University of Cambridge - UK	http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/www/gsa1001.htm



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