The Digital Revolution - Making the common man smarter

I fondly remember getting my first internet connection at our home in Abu Dhabi. It was a very slow connection at the time [28.8kps] but what it offered in terms of information usage was quite astounding. We were able to check for information online and for the most part it served its purpose for email and keeping touch. Fast-forward to 1999 and my first day in college. I never knew that the speeds available were so much better and that the information being used and passed around was even bigger than I had imagined. Absorbing so much information in one sitting is impossible and no single person on the planet can claim to know everything there is to know about anything or everything.

With the digital revolution has come many good things - Social Networking sites, search engines, blogs, wikis, etc. but the real question we have to ask ourselves is where is it all really going? Is the common man starting to encroach on avenues where he/she would normally not have gone 10 years ago? Are people developing and propagating tastes to their friends that they never would have and as a result changing the mindset of people who might have not bothered about things such as smart-phones years ago? I find it rather annoying at times when someone comes into a forum and posts a technical specification rather than talk about how the device performs and offers real depth to the conversation rather than copy and pasting. Moreover, the trend now is to just spew out whatever we read and most times we think that industry experts are offering advice on how a topic should be dealt with but we don't really know if someone that is half our age is sitting there offering advice on a device he/she might never have worked on. Does this make the information any less valuable? No. Does this make the information a 100% right? Definitely not. While some sites are offering control mechanisms on how the information is handled, like Wikipedia, there are still skeptics like me who take a step back and ask where the information came from.

As the information age progresses people have also learned to open search engines on their phones and end conversations that would have gone on for days about a topic people could only research with the actual device in their hand. This is what the issue with this information boom has been. Now, everybody has an opinion on a device and they can offer this opinion without any hands-on experience. To add to the technocrat's misery is that these people are not technically sound either and are just consumers of a device trying to show their intellectual prowess in an argument that can be ended by getting into specifics of a device that the common man can't find on a search engine.

I feel that a step in the right direction should be closing off information to the public that is a step above the actual working of the phone and see how many people actually have a say about something that they cannot see or know about. The reverse advertising principle of not showing anything and letting consumers try it out for themselves when they see the product might work but then again you know there is someone out there who feels its his calling in life to post a video and comment on the device. This person might be 10 years old and so his opinion probably really doesn't count to someone looking for more sound technical advice but you get my drift.

I have nothing against providing information to the masses. I just have a problem with the masses thinking they are all experts.

Mood while writing this blog - Fresh

Music listened to while writing this blog - The sound of a crow on my terrace