20100710.1435

There are times when, upon looking at various news reports and comments made about them, I feel great sadness at the state of humanity. I do realize that the anonymity of Internet postings makes it "safer" for people to vent spleen, to make incendiary comments that, were they more directly associated with their words, they would not voice. I also realize that this is a tendency, not an absolute, and that there are a number of exceptions; many people who post under handles remain as respectful and pleasant as they are face-to-face (or are even more so), while others (myself included) work more or less with the same level of vitriol without regard to medium.

And I have posted my name to this blog (by which I mean Ravings with a Dash of Lucid Prose on Blogger, for those who read my comments in re-post).

I am hardly alone in decrying trolling and various other forms of rudeness (hypocritically, I know, in my case, as many who know me will continue to happily attest); Lynne Truss is one of the more widely-known examples, I think. But it is not really a recent phenomenon. The distinction is that people tend to be more overt in their rudeness now--there is less incentive to be subtle.

In some ways, this is without doubt a reflection of protected free speech (for those who have it). One of the primary justifications for protecting speech is that advancement depends upon the generation of new ideas, some of which may be considered execrable when initially voiced but which prove to be more accurate than orthodox views in place at the time of initial voicing. Astronomical models provide some of the more telling historical examples of such advancements.

The problem--if it is actually a problem--with that is that to find new good ideas necessarily means working on many ideas, and not all of them will be good ones. It is an unavoidable thing, then, that bad ideas will get voiced, even by people who otherwise tend to put forward good ones.

(I am not certain whether or not to include myself in that category. Thus, I probably ought not to. But many of you are aware of that already.)

One thing that wider access to the Internet has permitted is an increase of the ability for people to find ideas and to give voice to their own (or, more frequently, parrotings of others' ideas). And that does have the great benefit of putting more good ideas in positions where more people can latch onto them. But it does the same for bad ideas, and there are a lot more bad ideas than good--however either "good" or "bad" is defined.

Definition is problematic. Often, definitions are received items, deposited (despite Freire's injunctions against that process) and not reflected upon. Too rarely do we look at what we believe a thing is and means and consider why we do so. It is easy to simply accept what we "already know" or what is simply told to us, and while it is admittedly true that there are many circumstances in which we should do so (because none of us has enough knowledge in ourselves to be able to carry out fruitful investigations of all truths), we allow ourselves to do so even beyond when it is reasonable to do so.

Hell, most of us don't even know when it is reasonable and when it isn't. And that strikes me as being a large problem.