The internet changes everything: News

Tell me if you've read Digg.

Now how about Google news? How about StumbleUpon, or any of these aggregator-type services. They bring together articles either popularly voted upon by the users (Digg), selected to match the user's interests (StumbleUpon), or some combination of the two. Sites like this get a lot of traffic because they deliver what their consumers want.

And for this reason they are tainted. Very tainted.

I realized this, interestingly enough, watching a roundtable discussion on ABC. I believe it's George Stephanopoulos who leads these, and they are actually quite intriguing. It was a comment by George Will that got me thinking. The discussion was on the election, and on the ad campaigns used by the candidates. Will is a fairly conservative political commentator, and this is why I found it so interesting. I found it interesting because I agreed with what he said.

George Will is a very intelligent person, no doubt, but it is important to note that he tolds generally opposing views to mine. Now, this should not be a surprise to a reasonable person. A man like George Will gets into politics because he is smart, not because of his partisan views. And yet, I spent a summer with the internet and no TV, getting my political commentary from the internet.

That was a mistake.

Now, articles on Huffington Post and Think Progress, while inflammatory, do contain interesting and pertinent information. This past presidency has been an ordeal for the American economy, as well as the Constitution, and liberal analysts and pundits have plenty to get pissed about. I mean, there is a fair bipartisan consensus that this administration has been unkind to the economy.

My mistake was not in reading articles in sites like Think Progress. My mistake was reading the commenters.

Now, first I will say that the average troll on that site makes Republicans sound like Nazi Earth-Rapists who wear the American flag as a bathrobe, and can't complete a sentence without the phrase '9/11'. Jeez. But the regulars are able to boil down liberalism to catchy phrases like 'McSame' and 'Rethuglicans' that make me think no one knows how to write any more. The fist-pumping empty rhetoric makes me swear that I'm on a propaganda movie shoot in communist Russia. It is THAT bad.

I learned very quickly in my first policy classes that the reason multi-party systems exist is because there aren't single right answers. And usually, as we've seen here, one can only determine if a solution is wrong after it's been tried. Now, that logic alone secures my choice for president, because anyone who publicly announces that they will continue to try failed ideas is crazy.

That being said, everyone on both sides needs to listen to both candidates. They need to find out everything they can, because regardless of who gets in office, we as citizens have our own responsibility that we previously failed at, and that is keeping our elected officials accountable. They represent you, so make sure they know it. And don't let some catchphrase-spewing uneducated moron, left or right, tell you otherwise.