Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!oliveb!sun!tma1!peb From: peb%tma1@Sun.COM (Paul Baclaski) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Another Effect of Computers Summary: But Television *is* Reality to most people; hypertext? Message-ID: <93683@sun.uucp> Date: 13 Mar 89 21:18:54 GMT References: <3383@ficc.uu.net> <3385@ficc.uu.net> Sender: news@sun.uucp Lines: 41 In article <3385@ficc.uu.net>, jbush@ficc.uu.net (james bush) writes: > ... My only fear is that the net will still > only go out to a limited group of people. Most people will still have > the networks as their major source of news. ... I also find it very frustrating to get good alternative information and try to explain it to people who are not connected--especially in the politcal relm. The pervading attitude of a considerable number of people is "That can't be true since I did not see that on television." In other words, "Television *is* Reality." If the Christic Institute's civil suit was covered by the major media, it would become Real. Currently, it is alternative/liberal press/ conspiracy theories. I think the psychological concept of Cognitive Dissonance applies here: people like to feel assured that they understand the world. If they get conflicting reports about the same thing, they feel edgy--and will actively avoid conflicting information. The old saying about the person who has only read one book applies here. When I hear someone say "The says that ", I like to point out that all the experts do not agree on everything. The follow up question is "what do you trust and why?" The advent of a public, large-scale hypertext forum will be very important in making discussion possible--an alternative to the spoon fed news we get now. The information overload will be delt with by good filtering in which the reputation of a writer will become very important. A good example of this was the California insurance referendums--the voters had to choose between various proposals, read hard to understand legalese, and evaluate the impact given economic and political implications. How many people have the time to do this? Very few. So, what happens is that they must trust someone--and the name they trusted was Ralph Nader. The proposal Nader stood behind won by a long shot. I think this is a perfect example of how things occur in a democracy with varied sources of information in the context of information overload. A public "hyper-forum" will probably have the same constraints. The good thing about a hyper-forum is that the boundary between just viewing, and interacting is a smooth continuum, which makes it much more inviting. Today, if you want to interact, you must drive somewhere and attend a public meeting or something--this is a hard barrier.