Consciousness of disinformation

[Christopher Locke]

At 07:36 PM 6/26/97 -0700, Jim Hurd wrote:
>
>An interesting question.  Do libraries also make clear that many
>of their books contain a lot of nonsense too? My favorite used book store
>here in Bloomington is named "Caveat Emptor".  I would be very fearful of
>any Library that contained only "The Truth". 

hear, hear!  this whole concern about "disinformation" sounds
suspiciously to me like a high-brow version of the CDA, rationalized
by a similar paternalism; *they* must be protected from themselves.

I wonder which information providers could be considered unequivocally
trustworthy.  let's consider some possibilities of uncompromised
sources:

    1) Universities -- because they never take whacking huge grants
       from the Federal government.

    2) Journals -- because they are refereed by collegial peers
       unsullied by academic politics.

    3) Print publications -- because the principle of "church and
       state" prevents multi-million dollar advertising buys from
       influencing decisions about editorial content.

    4) Government publications -- because it is the government Of, By
       and For The People, and only wants what is best for us.

Balance this against an open Internet where people can for the first
time speak their own minds and decide for themselves what's crap and
what's not.  If they can't do that online, then why should they be any
more expected to sort fact from fiction in a library or a bookstore?
Unless, of course, we begin to CONTROL the BAD information...  and
that road leads to a very nasty sort of elitist intellectual fascism.

Caveat Emptor indeed.

best

chris (a.k.a. RageBoy)

                      Entropy Gradient Reversals
                       All Noise - All the Time
                   http://www.panix.com/~clocke/EGR

           "Mistakes are the price we pay for a full life."
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