Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Thoughts while sitting at my computer

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my computer cruising the web, I feel like I'm omniscient.

om·ni·scient
Function: adjective

Etymology: New Latin omniscient-, omnisciens, back-formation from Medieval Latin omniscientia
Date: circa 1604
1 : having infinite awareness, understanding, and insight
2 : possessed of universal or complete knowledge
from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/omniscient

It was always my dream that when I died and went to heaven, I'd be able to sit at a TV/Computer monitor and tune into different times and places to see what "really" happened. How did the Chicago fire "really" start? Was there anyone else involved in the Kennedy assassination?

At this point in time, we can google almost anything and anyone. We can use Google Earth to look at nearly the entire world. Some places in the world, we can even see things from "street level" and look at buildings and sometimes people.

We can look at what the weather is like anywhere, too.

News is almost instantaneous. Just 150 years ago, news was hard to come by. A hundred years ago, telegraphs made news more timely, but we still had to wait until it was printed. Radio brought the news into our living rooms. TV brought the news with pictures every evening. Now we have so many channels with news to choose from, all with a slightly different slant on the news, that it is increasingly difficult to know who to believe.

A few years ago a friend of mine came back to us with the very same information shared a week earlier by someone in our peer group, which my friend had pointedly ignored at the time. He now said it must be true because he had found it on the internet.

That scares me.

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