Ancient philosophers’ thoughts found on the Internet can effect the way we think about the Internet itself, as well as other ‘bigger’ things…Written by Jesse S. Somer
Here I am again sitting at my computer, my job is to write about positive aspects of Internet. I’d like to think of myself as a bit of a novice philosopher as well as writer. The other day in poetry class at university my lecturer mentioned a quote from a guy who I had already read and enjoyed, Baruch/Benedictus Spinoza. The quote mentioned was quite a simple one, and in my opinion simplicity is best form of communication (and everything else for that matter). Spinoza once said, “Reality is perfection.” I feel this idea is quite a powerful one indeed, in relation to all aspects of life, including Internet.Where do you go these days when you want to find out about anything? Church? School? Parents? No, you go to Internet. The Internet is collective pool of unconscious, sub consciousness, and conscious ideas, beliefs, knowledge and wisdom of humanity from past to present. There has never been such a tool available for us. Of course there is a perfectly imperfect amount of crap out there to sift through as well, but that is intrinsic in this perfectly balanced reality that has always existed. So, if reality has always been perfect, why is existence of Internet anything special? The truth is, it is only as special as anything else in life. Now, you have to ask yourself, “Is life special?” I think you know answer to that one…then again there’s that perfect paradoxical balance. Why Internet then? Well, my younger brother once said, and I don’t know where he pulled this little tidbit of wisdom, “The only constant in Universe is that everything is in constant transition.” The Internet exists because of a natural progression in human thinking; it’s an evolution of our collective minds. It is a constructed idea formed through process of eternal change. Human beings have a huge history spanning at least half a million years. As well as magic feeling of love there has always been balancing emotion of fear. It seems that over time societies go through different stages where one of these feelings dominates and then permeates general actions by community. At moment many people would find it hard to disagree with fact that we are in a period of fear. With war, hatred and segregation prevalent in reality as well as ‘reality’ presented by media news and TV/film, fear is reigning supreme in many of our daily interactions.
| | Getting Away from Mainstream Media and Finding the News That's RelevantWritten by Jesse S. Somer
If you’re anything like me you are really getting tired of mainstream media’s one-voice-to-many analysis of life on Earth. First of all, it’s just too negative! I read a survey recently that stated that fourteen out of fifteen newspaper and TV News stories had negative fear-based stories. I don’t know about you, but if I look at my everyday life, amount of good and bad I experience seems to be much more balanced. Why does ‘big’ media think we all love hearing dark side of things so much?If you look at what news stories truly are in historical terms, it is a person sitting around tribal campfire at night telling a tale to inform people both in wisdom and knowledge. In any tribe there were many storytellers, so different perspectives were always available to masses. Well, if you think today’s media sources are too monopolized in their power of authority over stories we are told, there’s a new option for humanity. The answers and views we are seeking in our daily lives could lie in Internet. This Internet thing really could be key for humanity to evolving into a species that thinks independently, leaving this age of fear behind. It’s time to bypass main media sources. On Web we can access non-profit news organizations, we can hear personal views of individuals in news forums and blogs, we can even express our own views on world issues as well as sharing our own personal experiences! With this newly accepted technology called RSS Readers we can start to get type of information that we feel is most relevant to ourselves as individuals. It comes straight to us and then we can sort through it and decide which people and sources we want to hear from on a regular basis. This is awesome as it means we don’t have to search through a bunch of stories that have little interest to us. It also means if we want to hear more positivism, we can push negative views out of our perceptions.
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