Blogformity or the New Goebbels (It's the end of the world as we know it Part III)

Just a thought today. The power of the internet is thought to lie in the fact that the sum of man's knowledge is accessible to the people at the touch of a button. Blogs have given the everyday man the ability to project his ideas into this world, widening the range of information and opinions. We, as blog readers, have access to a myriad of different viewpoints on an almost infinite number of topics. Seen from this point of view, blogs are a good influence. However, take a second to analyze your own internet behaviour. Do you tend to read information from many different sources, sampling a bit from the entire spectrum of thinking? I don't, which got me thinking about the internet and blogs as a destructive forum for reinforcement of our beliefs, then I remembered that it's the 10th tomorrow, and it won't matter anymore.

Google turned 10 on Friday, CERN, the "inventor's" of the net fire up the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tomorrow (Sept.10th); while the latter have planned this day for decades, do you think Google ever thought they'd be where they are now? Scientific American has a pretty good run down on the LHC start up beneath France and Switzerland. As the proton beam circles the 27 km underground ring for the first time, CERN is also rolling out the grid which will be useful if the search for the mysteries surrounding the beginning of time and the thus far elusive Higgs particle don't bring about a micro black hole and the end of the world. As the internet is due to fill up soon, it is hoped that the grid will be its super speedy swanky swift replacement (10,000 times the speed of broadband). The numbers are terrifying again, literally, as they'll be playing in the long awaited tera scale power region, a trillion electron volts, or 1 TeV where they hope new physics will occur, bearing the Higgs particle which imbues all particles with mass and constitutes dark matter which is responsible for most of the material in the universe. Having to record such measurements and share the information around the world (here we're talking about petabytes of information, a million gigabytes) is enough to threaten the crashing of their earlier data sharing little internet thing. Those wild and crazy CERN kids!

You? Remember your first internet connection, what did you want to find that day? It's time to seek out a wider view on the world today before it's obsolete. Seek out a few blogs whose hobbies, opinions and political beliefs differ from your own. Make sure they have an active comment board and post a few comments on some posts stating your view on the subject presented. Perhaps if your viewpoint is different than those using the blog, you will be gang-attacked, with teeth showing and froth dripping from the jaws. Kinda funny, maybe; kinda scary, definitely. What is happening is that instead of using this tool as a way of exposing ourselves to new ideas, most people tend to seek out those who share the same way of thinking as we do, thus reinforcing pre-existing ideas. It's a pull medium, use it that way to get what you need, new perspectives instead of having your old ones re-enforced. Guess I'll take my own advice and start reading some right-wing conservative blogs, any suggestions anyone?