Good luck to the You Tube billionaires who were bought out last week by Google. However...

...Whether it was the Gutenberg press, the telegraph, radio, or the internet, the first blush of a new media format often leads to epoch-making claims of the kind seen in this article.

While movable type may very well have shattered the medieval church's monopoly on knowledge, the printing press has evolved simultaneously into a symbol of democratic freedom of speech; and the oppresive engine of state propaganda and media monopolies, which even this week were given extra muscle by law reforms.

Slowly but surely, those with their hands on serious capital are waking up to the fact that they can aggregate the readers of thousands of blogs into a large audience to sell to advertisers.

Where creativity flourishes, commerce will not be far behind...

I would hope that most people see through this empty arguement.

Yes, blogs and alternative media have grown drastically, but they are not even close to the MSM in terms of influence and agenda setting.

People who can be bothered getting onto to the internet to read a variety of news sources can think for themselves, its the brainless lemmings that believe things like Iraq has WMD that we need to be worried about, and their news sources are TV media or pathetic rags like the Herald Sun or Telegraph.

Of all the low down, dirty rotten , self interested, couldn't give a rats a*s about future generations things this govt. has done these media 'reforms' are just about the lowest.

Carl, to your short list of pathetic rags, might I suggest you include the SMH and The Age - all the papers are trash - and they're all slowly dying just as all print media will, but for the moment, where else can we go for our news? Reuters? AP? It's all the same rubbish anyway. Except of course different sub-editors put different spins on the same facts, depending upon which side of the political fence they sit.

And to Mercurious, please forgive me that I didn't get back to you about that issue of Japanese language syllabus - too busy. Sorry mate.

But this author here, this Dr Michael Anderson, has got to be joking. Apart from the fact that the article is an unashamed promo for his own damn book - gosh I hate that - I ask, who is he trying to kid?

I've seen school productions from drama class in NSW and they suck!

I've seen teachers and parents clapping and besides themselves with joy that their little children created their own frightful garbage and everybody is just soooo happy about little Janeie's new oratory and Beckie's new art-dance-performance. But only a school teacher or a mother could love it. The stuff is shocking!

It's just like the Australian movie industry. Everyone in the business thinks they're all so FIGJAM, but nobody ever goes to see them. The movies don't get box-office.

On the other hand, the author is completely correct about the (slowly) shifting power of the little people in media. Never before in the entire history of mankind have so many people had so much power at their finger tips when it comes to communication and self expression. It's absolutely awesome. And I would imagine that the youngest generations will adopt it as being just a normal part of their daily lives and extend themselves into it.

But whither the future. With the good, will come the bad. With power will come controls. Something this good, this cheap and so free, won't be permitted to go uncontrolled for long - or untaxed.

Yes, I completely agree Maximus, they are all garbage, and now they are only going to get worse.

BB1
A search for the Dinkum Truth?

It seems much is being hidden about the real truth in Iraq, especially as branches of Coptic-style Christian churches who had been getting on with the Muslims have been forced to leave?

Below is a brief on a deep perusal of America by Dr Denis Kenny, former tutor at Harvard and Fordham universities

The United States of America has long been regarded as the most generously endowed piece of real estate on this planet. It has inherited from Mother Nature, and appopriated from the Indian nations, an immense wealth of natural resources. The first nation in history, moreover to promise its citizens a basic right to the pursuit of happiness, a promise unprecedented in the annals of previous social orders.

Why, then, since the close of the 19th century, and the closing decades of the 20th century, has the US in the name of defence, freedom and democracy, continued to kill men, women and children, the latest in the supplying of heavy ariel bombs to Israel to destroy Lebanese buildings, the bombs also filled with scatter grenades to kill or maim the occupants.

Why, as many US patriots have asked over the last two hundred years, have not US governments remained contentedly within their borders and not endlessly wrangled with the less endowed nations of this world?

(Maybe colonial Pax Britannica could have been accused of the same thing, Anglophonic Americana having only inherited from the Brits?)

According to Dr Kenny, perhaps more than any other culture or nation, the US is a product of a complex, but identifiable configuration of memetic influences. To list the most important of these and the role they have played in the shifting sagas of US foreign policy.

The Puritans of New England were the first to encase within a political framework not only a deep commitment to success in this world, but that such an achievement was an assurance of religous salvation.

Unlike the secularising tendencies of European culture, the Americans have periodically engaged in religous revivals to maintain the religous spirit of the first settlers.

BB Part Two

Dr Kenny has two other memes contributing to the complex configuration of US culture and consciousness. The first of the two - Rational Enlightenment. The main early actors - Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. All were not Puritans, but Unitarians, Deists, and even outright agnostics or atheists.

The third consists of the frontier meme, but as adventurers and pirates et al, were and are still common to Western advancement, we might suggest that in the US they could have evolved from both of the main US historical personas.

Further, as regards the above two main US memes or personas, we might suggest we now have similar in Australia. John Howard and Peter Costello’s often published interests regarding the Hillsong Church - which does imply that different to the teachings of the early Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, now to many Australian Christians, success in business, could be seen as an assurance for a ticket to Heaven.

We Australians having had so much regard for America as explained in a previous Post, one wonders what the future now holds? While some blame America’s overdone role in Vietnam, as well as over-reach in the Middle-East, others blame the atomic arming of Israel in the 1970s, for helping to bring on Arab suicide bombing. Also as social philosophers point out, suicide bombing is not only related to the Islamic psyche. The Tamil Tigers hold the record by far, well over 400 cases, in fact.

Finally, as open-minded students do we need to discuss Dr Kenny’s targetting of a US Christianity which obviously favours more the Old Testament - any means to an end - doctrine which unfortunately is all too similar to the mindset of a Lutheran bishop in Nazi Germany who suggested to certain outspoken members of his worried clergy, that if you do really believe in the Almighty, your Spirit will be cleansed after death, despite all.

The above makes one glad that he has been trying to temper some of these worrying new Christian beliefs with Socratic Reasoning.