[OT] TV, Internet, and Democracy

[JoeHill]

Scott Elcomb left a post-it on the fridge:

> I know this post is relatively off-topic for many on the list, but I
> do believe it has value for this community...
> 
> The URL below contains an excerpt from a book entitled "The Assault on
> Reason" by Al Gore. The book is due out next year (as I understand it)
> and contains commentary similar to that which I've posted here and in
> other Canadian FOSS forums over the last couple of years.
> 
> http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015-1,00.html
> 
> While the book isn't out yet, I'd be curious to hear what
> reviews/thoughts tluggers might have for this particular excerpt.  My
> personal preference would be to discuss on-list (to encourage valuable
> communication amongst a primarily Canadian readership) but at the same
> time, I'm not connected to the administration of TLUG either.  Please
> use your judgment (and respect that of the GTALUG administration) and,
> as always, feel free to send comments to me directly.

Cool! Now to reassert myself as the list's resident Crazy.

Hrm, well, after seeing An Inconvenient Truth and watching Gore on shows like
The Daily Show, it's hard not to like the guy, and believe that he's basically a
decent person.

Then I remember how he answered the question about why he and Clinton bombed a
pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan, leading to the preventable deaths of millions
and eventually the chaos that we are seeing today. That, and many other things
that Gore presided over as VP, were certainly much more than 'assaults on
reason'.

Okay, let bygones be bygones, right?

Seeing what Gore has to say in this excerpt, I can't help but wonder what the
heck the rest of the book is about. Not that I don't doubt it's all perfectly
valid, it's just not terribly original in terms of the concept, from what I can
see. It sounds much like a book by Ben Agger, 'The Decline of Discourse', and
I'm sure many other books.

Noam Chomsky has written extensively on the idea that fact-based approaches to
discourse are and have been under attack for quite some time, and that the
twentieth century has merely seen the escalation of the 'manufacturing of
consent'.

The only evidence that Gore has made an attempt at anything different is in
passages such as this:

"At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial
was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good
sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely
an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take
over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert
Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney
and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole."

Of course, he does not go further than to pooh-pooh the media, never seeming
to notice that all of the media outlets which engage in this kind of behaviour,
and who dominate the 'mainstream' diet, are owned by a small cadre of dedicated
neo-con political operatives who have a measurable interest in numbing the
public mind with crap about Paris Hilton.

Then I see something that absolutely delights me whenever it pops up: Al Gore
talking about the internet. Wheeeeeeee!

Okay, yes, bloggers and sites like Slate and Alternet are overtaking TV news
when it comes to drawing the attention of middle class post-literate dweebs
like me, but the people who have been truly left out of the democratic process,
if our process can even legitimately be called that, are also the people who
are highly unlikely to have a broadband connection; and even if they are
connected, what good is it going to do them when they've been deliberately
disenfranchised on voting day, again a concept with which Gore should be very
very familiar.

The revolution will be online, quite probably, but Al Gore will have nothing to
do with it.

-- 
JoeHill
++++++++++++++++++++
   Gypsy robot: You want to die? 
   Bender: No, I wanna live! There's still too many things I don't own.  
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