The Age of Information

My last blog post about Glenn Beck drew a response from The Workbench Blogger on my website (http://georgeswebpage.com/gene) If you didn't click on the link and read it, the gist of the response was that contrary to my thesis, it was a very good thing we have folks like Glenn Beck to keep us 'informed'. I put informed in quotes because where one person regards what they say as 'informed' another might view it as a pile of crap. Anyway, my point here is not to debate the issue any further. Rather, I got to thinking about the so-called Age of Information which is what we're ostensibly in. We are bombarded by an almost infinite amount of stuff-from Radio & TV, print media, iPhones, Blackberrys, and last and probably most of all the Internet. Yet in spite of all of these sources of information, we humans continue to rely on the few sources of information we've come to admire or agree with. Let me be the first to admit I'm absolutely guilty of this along with everyone else. My sources of news are mostly certain TV newscasts, one or two internet websites, MSNBC, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and finally our town and local newspapers. That's it. No Fox News in this house. No conservative radio stations. No National Review magazines will ever be found by my chair. Pretty much just the sources I cited above and I'm betting that even those are a lot more than those of most other people. First of all, who has time to read, listen or watch everything out there? Second, most of it is in complete disagreement to our own thinking so why bother? In most cases like everyone else, I'm not likely to change my mind on where I stand on most issues. So what conclusion can be drawn from all this? Basically, people believe what they believe and they're going to seek out sources of information to reinforce those beliefs. The rest gets ignored. So why do we need all that other stuff? To sell ads of course!