I came across Google Baraza yesterday: a site in which people can post questions for others to answer: http://www.google.com/baraza/en/
My first naive intuition was that this could be an interesting way to discern what people are thinking about, and so I spent a bit of time looking at both questions and answers. These included the following issues, so concerning that they drove people to pose questions to the world:
- Why can’t a woman leave you peace fully [sic] when you break up?
- Is it possible to genuinely fall in love with a lady without telling even a single lie?
- Which one’s better: a surgeon or an actuary?
- Why has music evolved to these crap auto tune and techno remixes?
- Are human beings “farmed” for their DNA (or flesh slaves)?
- Why do women like Mozambican men?
Even with the advanced search capabilities available on the net, there are still, occasionally, questions for which the answers are difficult to source. The net may place the wisdom of the ages at our fingertips, but not everything is easy to find: Baraza may offer a solution to the gap between what information is published and what is needed. But I was struck by the discord between the potential of Baraza and the inanity of the content.
Has somebody seriously been pondering why Mozambican men are like catnip to ladies? Is someone honestly fearful that their flesh is being coveted from across the cosmos? These questions don’t deserve comment – they have no substance outside of somebody’s whimsical internal dialog.
We all choose what we buy into – and people have every right to verbalize their beliefs; but Bazara is highlighting the paucity of logic that people use. I have been pondering this: the rise of Web2.0 technologies have shifted the power of expression into the hands of the individual; but, to misquote one of the sages of our time – it is impossible to shift both power and responsibility to the individual at the same time. As much as some people will use these technologies to express coherent viewpoints and try influence the collective thought process, most will just dribble their inanities into the public forum.
The issue is not that people think mindless thoughts – the issue is that the expression of these thoughts using Web2.0 technologies elevates this content by association. If the medium is the message, these messages pollute the collective conscious that is the web dialog.
The internet held the promise of an intellectual democracy, with the same ease of access for publishing and accessing information. Unfortunately, this has only highlighted the existing inequities in reasoning. The internet elevates equally – even when the message is inane.
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For a worthwhile commentary on McLuhan’s message, see http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm
