In my last post I lamented anonymous blogging. A sort of corollary to that is the phenomenon where people gravitate toward sites that contain content they agree with. One thing about all the personalization of the internet is that it is so insulating. If you spend all your time in one genre, so to speak, the rest of the world passes you by. A byproduct of this is that now that my teenager is out of the house I have no clue about music anymore. Someone just hand me a fully loaded IPOD, please!
As a long time watcher of political evolution I long ago concluded that the greatest thing about our system of government is the debate and compromise method of making law. To that end I have always felt that the best situation is when the power is split among the parties. I am in hog heaven when you have a Democractic congress and a Republican presidency, or vice versa and at the local level a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature. The resulting action are going to be much more well considered in that scenario.
In terms of political thinking this concept has been fleshed out in a new book of which I read a review on Salon.com. You can read an interview with the author at this link:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/11/07/sunstein/index.html
"The Internet is making us stupid"
Legal sage Cass Sunstein says democracy is the first casualty of political
discourse in the digital age.
By Ben Van Heuvelen
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