My post on Learning from YouTube was written early in the morning, before the story made its way to the "weird news" section of the news sites. Since then, of course, the story has shown up on Fark.com, and become a subject for the commenters there.
Those of you with an interest in the divergence between facts and opinion in our current social model may want to take a look. Why is it we're reduced to stereotypes, loudly-voiced opinions that wouldn't hold up to facts found in the most basic google-search, and the lowest-common-denominator opinions of those suffering Internet Tough Guy Syndrome?
Any chance for a return to reasoned discourse in the forseeable future?
2 years ago
2 comments:
There are a lot of dummies in the world. :)
True, unfortunately.
One of the ironies, of course, is that Pitzer is a very tough school to get in to. The Claremont Colleges are considered by many to be effectively West Coast Ivy League. The people who go there -- and I taught some of them when I was a T.A. out that way -- are going to be real movers and shakers, both because they are very smart and because they are generally extremely well-connected.
Yet the comments in that Fark.com article were all written from some position of superiority. In some cases the implication was that these folks would be flipping burgers in a few years -- which is definitely not true -- and in others it was implied that they were ineffective intellectuals who should be doing something more "productive."
Ironically, the Pitzer grads will be the people who own and run the media the Fark commenters will sit back and watch.... And comment on.
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