Is the internet a threat to the status quo of society?

Similar questions: internet threat status quo society.

No, the Internet really has no effect on the status quo. Of course, in order to be a "threat" suggests that the Internet has the capacity for unwanted, unsettling, or perhaps revolutionary change, and the status quo would have to be a desirable state of affairs in which any change would be highly debatable if it were an improvement. Forty years ago, back in high school, we used to debate such topics as "Do you think the United States should engage in multilateral nuclear arms reduction treaties, or do you favor the status quo?" "Do you subscribe to the theory one man one vote should be extended to Negroes, or do you favor the status quo?

"Do you think that television is a threat to the status quo? " If you look at these questions today, they are as equivocal now as they were then. Thanks to the Internet our telephones, TVs, radios, news media, libraries, cell phones, GPS tracking devices, our home surveillance devices, our financial, medical and personal information, our mail, music and video libraries, our entertainment networks, consumer purchases are all consolidated into one all-seeing eye, connected to one never-forgetting computer.

Which means all of your sexual interests and habits, your video and chatroom flirtations, and pretty much every one of your crackpot rants, blogs, chat room indiscretions or YouTube inanities and, of course, all of your e-mails will be recorded for all time--and conveniently, cross indexed, cataloged, archived in order to market to any prospective employer, landlord, or father-in-law, who chooses to cough up the customary fee find out what you are really like when you think you are "home alone. " Perhaps, some day down the line, you will pay exorbitant fees to have certain "items" removed from your file. But this is not really a "threat" to the status quo so much as it is a fulfillment of its potential--much the way that credit bureaus promise to perform a much more limited service on a more modest scale.

Choicepoint, already has some 15 billion items of information compiled in dossiers on Americans, not all of it accurate, not that that would makes much difference, since you already have no say-so in this information being collected about you in the first place, or to whom it is shown. Choicepoint lists have already been used to challenge voter lists in Florida, where 72,000 people were accused of being convicted felons in 2000, and thus ineligible to vote, when in fact their only crime was to be Black and likely to vote Democratic. Many people have forgotten that Chief Justice Rehnquist, who threw out Florida’s recount before the they could determine the popular winner, handing the election to G.W. Bush.

Many people have also forgotten that Rehnquist was the subject of a vote fixing scandal at his own Chief Justice confirmation hearing. There were document he wrote of being in favor of "separate but equal" accommodations for Blacks and Whites, and there was an opinion he wrote for the Arizona Republican party advising them how to intimidate and challenging Mexican-Americans when they turned up to vote. And there were even 3 credible witnesses called, but he lied his way through it and was confirmed anyway.

Greg Palest, in his book, "Armed Madhouse" documents how the Republican party basically stole the year 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and how they are planning to steal the 2008 election. The story has gotten only scant attention from the Corporate-dominated American press, but there are no such corporate controls on the Internet (right?). In fact, trying to tell a story on the Internet is like trying to shout above the band at a rock concert; you may get the message if your attention span holds out, but "You ain’t gonna do nothin.

" Why? Because you have no organizational context to help you even think about where to begin (although a good place to start is with your local and State Democratic Party’s Legal defense fund). So, as far as the Internet being a vital link between the citizens and their disappearing democracy, the Internet appears to be no "threat" either way.

As for those young radicals and revolutionaries who think they may someday change the world, you probably don’t have much to worry about holding on to your local video rental store job for the next few years, but further down road, when you are in line for your first government job or political appointment, somebody from the FBI or Dark Arts Incorporated will ask you whether you ever "inhaled," and not only will they have it on webcam, they will have a list of everyone your cyber buddies who, whether they saw anything or not, will not be abl to resist their 15 minutes of fame.So, you can rest comfortably, as if in your mother’s arms, that should you grow up to be brash and uppity, there will be endless buckets of slime to throw at you if you "threaten" the status quo. Although there are supposed to be fewer nukes in the world to day than there were 20 years ago, can you really trust your own governments to keep the peace? It used to be that the US was an island of sanity, rationality, progress, pragmatism and free trade, standing against the barbaric irrationalities of ethnic hatred and ancient blood feuds, and the twisted, unworkable ideologies of religious fanaticism.

Now, it is our political leaders who are chafing at the bit to nuke Iran, who likewise seem bent on cooperating in bringing about Armageddon between ourselves, Islam and Judaism. Where the rational calculus of mutually assured destruction used to protect the rational peoples of the earth, currently the invitation to an Apocalyptic final confrontation between good and evil, that the very prospect of total annihilation seems to spark eschatology fantasies about the end of times among our leaders. As for television being the great educator (or moral corrupts) of the masses, it has become neither.

Its search for the lowest common denominator has brought us, not the tools of high intellectual discourse, but the tools of emotional and sensationalists propaganda. Television has socialized us to expect to be amused, not only in our entertainment proper, but in our education and our politics. As the passive consumers of "content," which we prefer to be emotional and the sensationalistic, to the intellectual and the analytic.

We prefer the moralistic spectacle, to the complex and nuanced policy issues of the day, and we prefer knee-jerk moralistic positions, which scapegoat people for the failures of policy to any objective analysis of the policy itself. And while we have unlimited and instant access to factoids and information snippets, we rely upon talking heads to explain it to us in terms which entertainingly reassure from one or other of a limited number of ideological perspectives. We are seldom challenged with contrarian ideas which challenge our preconceptions or invite us to take our own look at the really big picture.As a result, we tend to hear more or less what we expect to hear, which is also what we want to hear, and indeed increasingly what we feel we are entitled to hear about a world that should at least entertain us by conforming to our ideas.

As a consequence we tend to walk around in a kind of dream world. We feel as if it is our God-given right that others respect our opinion, no matter how dangerously deluded, inhumane, ill-reasoned or ill-informed, or erroneous. And, in giving others what amounts to an automatic pass to believe anything that occurs to them, our discourse tends to concern itself almost entirely with ever shallower slogans and cliches, which ultimately stop any independent thought.

In the absence of real analysis, we get self-serving and self-congratulatory assessments of our problems, which eventually tend to become with blame-shifting and scapegoating, rather than thoughtful and pragmatic in nature. In fact, systemic thinking can take on a distinctly subversive flavor if one suggests that our casual disregard for the rights of others, our preemptive invasions, our policies of kidnapping and torturing others, just might in fact have something to do with the "terrorist" reprisals against us. Or, that the massive looting of the middle class by corporations over the past 25 years just may have something to do with decades of industry-inspired "deregulation.

" In none of these aspects of the status quo has the Internet been an important formative part, and while it may occasionally contain information about the status quo, I doubt that it can reach deep enough into the society and its power structure to even begin to touch the massive corruption that protects the status quo. Zuma's Recommendations Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents) Amazon List Price: $14.95 Used from: $8.64 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 63 reviews) Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild Amazon List Price: $15.00 Used from: $5.00 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 145 reviews) American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury Amazon List Price: $25.00 Used from: $5.00 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 184 reviews) The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege Amazon List Price: $14.95 Used from: $4.958 Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 11 reviews) Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project) Amazon List Price: $15.00 Used from: $4.959 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 61 reviews) The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) Amazon List Price: $15.00 Used from: $4.958 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 100 reviews) Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Amazon List Price: $15.00 Used from: $6.56 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 91 reviews) .

You know, I was involved in a company that was setting up the internet for the first time and back then I thought it was going to be something that was going to be real EVIL! That was like about 20 years ago. In some ways it is!.

In my opinion, it is -- thank goodness! When information is more readily and widely available, things will improve.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.