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Arthur C. Clarke on Information Pollution
Castolari writes "Here is an interesting interview of Arthur C. Clarke and his views on regulating communications, as well as what he sees as the past, present, and future of information management."
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But anyway, I can add my sentiments to the debate. Information pollution ? About time we bring this up.
Does the world really need that every peon around the world has his or her own web page with rants raves, and pictures of cats/gerbils/whatever ?
Do WE need it ? Sure, freedom of speech, expression and open communications, but...
I wonder how Google will tackle it when every human being on this planet is online with its own web page. Ouch.
"Q: Do you advocate stricter regulation of satellite television and the Internet?"
"A: I think it is technologically impossible for any one government to (directly) control, let alone ban, transmissions coming from earth orbit."
So, even though Sir Arthur C Clarke came from a time far before ours, when strict regulations were required to "keep everyone from going mad with Communism", he still has the enlightenment he did then.
If I was in control, I would try and find ways to get more Sir Arthur C Clarkes running around planet earth, not how to tie the world in knots with controls, regulations and dubious money-making schemes.
It's wonderful that he suggests humanity will survive the information age, but unclear to me if this is the case, because I'm mostly a cynic.
Well, not most of the time, anyway. I see the point he's trying to make, but the most important thing to do, in my opinion, is to provide means for people to escape this dredge of unwanted information (particularly advertising) if they so choose. This is why I strongly support the use and people's right to use ad-blockers and the like on the internet. Now, there is *one* thing I think needs to be heavily regulated, maybe even banned -- billboards. They make the road ugly, you can't escape them, and they might even contribute to increasing the rate of car accidents. (ie, plowing into a tree while gazing at a hooters ad...)
This IS the man that refuses to believe that we humans will ever use anything other than rockets to travel through space. (He's actually quoted as saying this) A lot of people credit him with creating the Satellite when all he did was slightly alter the concept of bouncing signals off the ionosphere, something which people had been doing since the birth of radio, pheh. He had like one or two good books, nothing to see here folks.
Quite true.
I recommend the 'sex' test.
Say 'sex' in most any classroom and everyone will look at you. There's quite a few other words that work, but that one's my favorite, because its not at all inappropriate. Sometimes, it even causes dead silence.
Oh, the fun of having nearly infinite social-experiment guinea-pigs in the general public.
Movies: RottenTomatoes, imdb, and MetaCritic have saved me dozens of hours of time I might have wasted on crap (like Matrix Revolutions, or TimeLine).
Books: Amazon, despite its evils (patents/privacy), is a very nice filter (with a few shills and idiot-reviewers). I [ab]use amazon as a filter, and then buy them cheaper new or used.
News: Popular Daily News Tidbits, Blogdex, Daypop, and slashdot.
Music: iRATE radio, and word of mouth. Need more Collaborative Filtering in this area to root out the Clearchannels/RIAAs function as a giant pusher of "cool"
Ads (aka: mental engineering): I use PopFile to filter SPAM, and Privoxy to filter out slow-loading, privacy-invading, all-around-annoying ADS. I'm still missing a proxy for my eyeballs in the real world. Soooon. :)
Cheap Products: Not a quality filter exactly, but a quantity filter: PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, Froogle, Anand's Hot Deals ...
Phew, that's a lot of linkage. Anyway, I couldn't function without these and other filters; I'd really be info overloaded.
Collaborative filtering in general has a very bright future IMO.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Sturmer, was tried at Nuremberg, sentenced to death and executed for the role his "free speech" played in the deaths of millions of people.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Clarke mentions that the term 'boot' came from 'kicking recalcitrant computers'. I'm pretty sure that it was more related to 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps', because in a sense starting a computer has to overcome some chicken-and-egg problems to get itself going.
Regardless, it was an interesting article. As a (slightly recovered) sci-fi fan, I've found that Clarke's books are still deeply engaging for me, when quite a few of the other authors I used to read have grown a bit tired. _Imperial Earth_ and _Rendezvous with Rama_ are probably my favorite hard sci-fi novels of all time, and his work on the movie version of _2001_ shouldn't be discounted.
He has such a great style to his writing; he makes predictions seem very natural. I think he's mastered the art, more than any other writer, of dropping slight predictions into science fiction. In one book, he mentions that a character watched "Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, much of the Disnet canon, Oliver's Hamlet, Ray's Pather Panchali, Kubrick's Napoleon Bonaparte, Zymanowski's Moby Dick, and many other old masterpieces..."
I love the progression of the sequence... (Kubrick never actually made Napoleon Bonaparte, but had planned on doing so.)
Clarke, in everything I've ever read by him, leans strongly towards trusting the intelligence and character of his readers and other people. This is especially true when he's commenting on legal issues. He does not like "big brotherism" -- laws passed to protect people from themselves. I think he feels that adults should be free to make their own choices and live with the consequences of those choices.
So I suspect his reaction to your question would be that anyone who is in the habit of thinking for himself in the first place isn't going to be unduly influenced by Clark's obviously partisan views on governmental information control. I think he'd probably also say that someone who isn't in the habit of thinking for himself needs to learn.
I hear that he's also allergic to fans who worship him instead of thinking about what he said and responding intelligently to it. So if I ever met him, I'll have to be careful not to tell him how much I loved, "Rendevous with Rama." ;>
Catherine
I agree that any and all forms of censorship should be outlawed. Take the case of sadistic porn. If all the people involved are adults (and so can make their own decisions) and get off on it, why should it be forbidden? They're not hurting anyone but themselves, and they don't see it as actually hurting themselves, so why forbid it? If something is really inherently bad (like kiddie porn), there will already be laws against making it, and you don't need laws against distributing it.
At the same time though, I don't think anyone should be forced to watch anything they don't want to watch. In other words: let there be freedom of speech, but not freedom to be listened to. Sadly, there are a lot of things which I'd like to ban outright out of my life (like advertising, in general), but am unable to. So it seems we have quite a way to travel here.