ungovernable

Everybody jokes about “TMI” these days:…

But the implications for our democracy are troubling. To achieve their goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of millions of citizens. Despite conventional thinking that the Internet helps spread information, such reach is actually impossible online.

Consider: In August 2007, there were about 100 million blogs. Of those that reached 100,000 people or more in a month, only about 20 focused on news or politics, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a company that measures Internet traffic. The most popular was Breitbart.com, with only 1.1 million unique visitors, or 0.4 percent of the 228 million U.S. adults 18 and older.

Moreover, visitors to blogs and Web sites probably don’t see most of the information on them. According to Nielsen Online, the average visitor to newspaper Web sites stops by for just 1.5 minutes per day on average. By contrast, the average print newspaper reader spends 40 minutes with each day’s edition…

the larger problem: The overload siphons audiences and revenue from newspapers such as The Post and other outlets that can spread important information, forcing these media to shrink and to rely increasingly on advertising to stay afloat. These trends predate the Internet era, but they’ve gotten worse.

And that there’s your real problem iddn’t it, Binky?  Your job security.

The opportunity to educate millions of citizens, so essential to significant movements of the past, has dwindled. In the early New Deal era, the Roman Catholic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin [the stone Socialist] promoted ideas for economic reform to a weekly audience estimated at 40 million, which helped pressure President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enact Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and other programs. Today’s top talk-radio host, Rush Limbaugh, reaches only about 14 million people per week.

Without broad media coverage, the civil rights movement might never have succeeded. In 1965, front-page newspaper coverage of the bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., helped push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, [despite the objections of the *Democratic* Party]…

[Paraphrased verbosity: Newspaper readership sales down from one paper for every two adults to one paper for every 4.5 adults… TV Nooz viewership down from 32 percent of the adult population to 12 percent of the adult population]

...The challenge is to find ways to strengthen democracy in the era of TMI. It won’t be easy, but the situation may not be irreversible, either.

Oh!  I see.  You’re trying to strengthen democracy, here, eh?  So what’s your proposal to make us all more Free?

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).

... If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices [*if*??!!  nice “argument,” Pal.  Epic Debate Society Fail], might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it?  [on his planet, Unite = Soylent Green whaaa?  it’s greeeen, iddn’t it?!] A reduced supply of information technology might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper-individualistic outlets we have now.
[Sitting in my 800sf high-rise in a walkable comuuuunity, listening to the Smart Train rumble by and digesting “community-centered media"… Kill me.  Kill me now.]

According to a site I found in on teh InnerToobs in 0.13 seconds, an average laptop uses about 105 watts 15-45 watts [as corrected by the author of the post *blushes*]—a regular dim bulb.  A super-dooper high-end gaming desktop with a CRT monitor [why?] would use 330 watts.  So running a laptop about 20 hours a week @ 10¢/kWh would cost a whopping $11 $3.12 a year.  Just how dam expensive does this douche want to make electricity to wipe us hyper-individualistic outlets off his planet and return his job security?

Change will no doubt be difficult [that’s not what Uh-bama said!], and it won’t happen overnight [that’s not what Uh-bama saaaid!]. But it’s time for some creative solutions for digging our democracy out of the information avalanche that threatens to smother it. [yeah.  It’s definitely too much Liberty that’s doing the “smothering.”]

‘Course if I had thought processes as stunted, twisted and freakishly atrophied as his, I’d be worried, too.

I goofed.  A laptop, according to Michael Bluejay of Saving Electricity uses 15-45 watts. [Please see his site for other useful information]

So, using the formula, [Watts X Hours Used / 1000] X Cost per kWh = Cost, I’ll use a mid range 30 watts X 20 hours/wk or 1,040/yr [31,200] /1000 [31.2] X cost of 10¢ per kWh to arrive at a whopping $3.12 a year to run an average laptop.