Online or otherwise.
This excellent article by Andrew Orlowski, the San Francisco correspondent of the excellent British IT-zine “The Register” debunks this delusion, the key argument being that weblog authors do not have the financial resources or the determination to dig out wrongdoing by the powerful. He also hilariously deflates US newspapers’ sanctimonious sense of self-importance.
Two great people passed away recently. The frivolous mass media did not widely report on them, as they prefer to fawn on “celebrities”, but each of them had a more significant and fundamental influence on our world than any two-bit actor or airhead princess ever will.
Laurent Schwartz, a French mathematician, did rate an obituary in Le Monde, mostly because of his courageous struggle against France’s colonial war of oppression in Algeria. He is the inventor of the theory of distributions, which extends ordinary functions to cope with things such as the Dirac delta “function”. It is a cornerstone of modern mathematical analysis and is used in signal analysis, itself the cornerstone of the technologies used to transmit data over analog media such as DSL.
Edsger Dijkstra, best known as the curmudgeonly Dutchman who advocated banning the goto statement, was a pioneering computer scientist who invented, among his many contributions, the algorithm which bears his name to find the shortest path in a graph and which is the basis for routing in the Internet.
You wouldn’t be able to read this page without these mens’ work.
At least for people who have Internet access at work, according to this study.
This is good news. George Gilder issued the most scathing indictment of TV I know:
Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar – it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns. All of world industry is moving increasingly towards more segmented markets. But in a broadcast medium, artists and writers cannot appeal to the highest aspirations and sensitivities of individuals. Instead, manipulative masters rule over huge masses of people.
George Gilder, Life After Television