[Leica] shift happens

[philippe.orlent at pandora.be (Philippe Orlent)]

It's just if you're always considering the sources that you can truly  
benefit from the internet.
Exponentially more possibilities to form your own opinion these days.
And in what would that differ from one source information that was  
thought to us at school?

Philippe


Op 5-aug-07, om 01:48 heeft Peter Klein het volgende geschreven:

> George and Ken:  It ain't just people in mental institutions.   
> You've just described one of the monkey wrenches in the works of  
> our Total Digital Nirvana.  People are still people.  Some of them  
> lie, cheat, and put bogus information out for fun, for profit, or  
> for political and ideological reasons. Or just because they can.
>
> Many people are swayed by the most charismatic arguer rather than  
> the most reasonable argument.  Yes, it was ever thus.  But the  
> spread of hate propaganda by the Internet is a worrisome  
> phenomenon, because the Internet amplifies the haters' reach.   
> Crackpots who would only attract a few dozen followers in two  
> counties now can have a global audience.  People who want to take  
> us all back to the Seventh Century are gaining followers and  
> issuing detonation orders using 21st Century technology.
>
> Case in point:  I recently saw the film "Taking Sides," an account  
> of the Allies' investigation of the great German conductor Wilhelm  
> Furtw?ngler after the end of World War II.  Unlike some other  
> artists and musicians who had the means to leave, Furtw?ngler chose  
> to remain in Germany under the Nazis.  His record was a bit  
> ambiguous here and there, but in sum it was pretty clear that he  
> was no Nazi himself.  He was tried by a denazification court, which  
> effectively cleared him of charges of collaboration.  But his  
> decision to stay in Germany haunted him for the rest of his life.
>
> This whole subject of how artists are co-opted and corrupted (or  
> not) by totalitarian regimes interests me greatly, so I went online  
> to read more.  I started with the Wikipedia article on Furtw?ngler.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Furtwangler
>
> I also read several of the references cited at the end of the  
> article, including this one:
> http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n3p-2_Charles.html
>
> Some of the writing in the latter seemed quite reasonable, but  
> every couple of paragraphs there was a statement criticizing Jews  
> or Jewish groups, or casting cultural life under the Nazis in a  
> positive light.  An alarm bell went off in my head, and I hit the  
> Web site's main page and "About Us" statement, only to discover  
> that it was the Institute for Historical Review!  This is the group  
> associated with convicted Holocaust denier David Irving.
>
> Now, I was raised in the obsolete print era, when we were always  
> taught to consider the source.  But in today's rapid-fire  
> information age, we have to ignore many things in order to make  
> sense of what comes across the Web.  I'm in a habit of mentally  
> filtering out extraneous material when I surf (ads, cute graphics,  
> etc), and in my haste to read the article, I failed to notice the  
> "Institute for Historical Review" banner at the top.
>
> I wonder how many uninformed people read this article and concluded  
> that there was some vast, coordinated Jewish-Zionist conspiracy to  
> discredit German culture and all innocent German artists who  
> happened to live there between 1933-1945.  For that is what the  
> article implied.  The site's "About Us" page makes that viewpoint  
> abundantly clear.
>
> But in the course of casual surfing, how many people would bother  
> to find that out?  What I'm saying is that along with this  
> exponential explosion of information, there is also an exponential  
> explosion of lies and hate propaganda.  And an information- 
> saturated, time-rushed audience is a bit more likely to believe the  
> lies.  If, as the famous New Yorker cartoon stated, "On the  
> Internet no one knows you're a dog," it is also true that on the  
> Internet you can hide the fact that you're a hatemonger.
>
> Even in Wikipedia, one of the prime "go-to" sites for information  
> on the Web.
>
> --Peter
>
> At 05:26 PM 8/3/2007 -0700, George Lottermoser wrote:
>> > Way back in the early sixties (well before computers) a teacher  
>> told
>> > our class, "the important thing is not knowing the information, but
>> > knowing where to find the information." I never forgot that  
>> line. He
>> > was of course speaking about the use of "card catalogs, reference
>> > books, library tools, interviews, etc." I wonder if he'd still  
>> agree;
>> > when all one has to do is "google" or "wiki" and assume that you've
>> > received all the reasonable answers to the question(s).
>
> Ken Carney wrote:
>>         I believe he would still agree, though the issue now, as  
>> always, is
>> the quality of the information.  I sometimes remind our staff that  
>> there is
>> a reason why we pay about $30,000 a year for online research  
>> access, and
>> that the wikipedia article might have been written by someone  
>> whiling away
>> the time in a mental institution somewhere.
>
>
>
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