Avoiding Responsibility

The potential power of the Internet has come into focus recently, and I for one hope that the trend continues. Specifically, I'm talking about the communication between people.

Take blogging for example. It has opened up a whole new world of communication between *people* - not a company talking to its consumers, or a journalist telling the news, but average people talking to other average people about average people stuff. And that is great - because when the average people get talking, it scares the living shite out of those who want to control the average people.

And that has been very much the case of the fallout from Hurricane Katrina. I have been reading a few blogs, written by average people, talking about their emotional response to the devastation caused not by the Hurricane, but by the ineptitude of the various US government's who are supposed to be dealing with the issue. People are angry - really f**king angry! The fact that people could have died in America because of dysentery just didn't factor on people's intellectual radar. I mean, come on, this is America! I don't care how big the storm is, we can still provide adequate shelter, food and medical supplies to those that will be affected can't we? Can't we?

I found it interesting to read some of the blogs where people had done a little more thinking about the issue, rather than just looking at the black people 'looting' and the white people 'struggling to survive'. There was the guy whose previous posts had been about shooting and country music festivals - who asked whether there could be some truth in all this 'climate change stuff'. Then there was the guy who had decided that the rise in oil prices wasn't a result of the hurricane, it was actually a ploy by the government to get the media to focus their attention elsewhere, rather than on the bungling of their emergency action plans.

Why is this important? Well, it isn't important in itself. The ramblings of a hick and a conspiracy nut won't really change much. But they are examples of what’s happening all around the Net - people speaking their minds, using the quasi-anonymity of the Net to say things out loud that they wouldn't scream from a street corner. And whilst it stays on the Net, it doesn't mean much. But as more people begin to talk, and then interact and *discuss*, things could get interesting.

Whilst people sit and watch CNN, the powers that be have the power. When people start discussing what they saw on CNN, the powers that be start to get worried!

In the immortal words of the Beastie Boys:

You gotta fight for your right to partay!