Saturday, January 4, 2014
Friday, January 3, 2014
This Blog...
In this blog, I hope to write many of the thoughts, questions and opinions that tend to rattle around my headspace, especially those that tend to favour this time of day (00:51).
I see blogging to be one of the best things the internet has brought us. Expressing one's self in a way that is accessible by the whole world has never been so easy.
There once was a time where to express one's self, you had to either create a public spectacle, possibly resulting in troubles with the law and/or towns folk, or you had to take the time to create a medium (such as a newsletter), then distribute it to people who you desired to read it. Blogs however have not always been available on the internet.
In the internet's infant years (the days of command line based computing), there were bulletin boards (BBS) where people were able to post what ever they liked for persons to read. The one downside with this was that BBS was quite limited in the way that you had to know the number of the BBS to access it and often BBS's were limited to a narrow scope of topic resulting in only like-minded persons with already similar points of view.
Todays internet with easy cross pollination between websites due to things such as Search Engines results in a much wider scope of opinion and topic making the gains from discussions much more rewarding.
This ease of communication between individuals via the internet regarding different topics can also be a double edge sword. This is quite evident on websites such as YouTube.
Youtube is a very common place for a phenomenon known as "Trolling." Trolling is the art of commenting on someone else's comment purely for the hope of getting a reaction, or getting the person upset. The most common topic that is "Trolled" is religion. Youtube, much like any diverse community is secular by nature resulting in a place where one should be able to free welcome their religion, or avoid religion. Trolling often occurs when someone comments in favour of their religion on a video that is in no way related to the religion, resulting in others to comment on this comment; offending the original comment writer and thus snowballing from there.
When thinking of the world and religion, I wonder whether the world would be a much better place if religions did not exist. But then, how would this have been possible? For religions have developed from simple-minded people trying to make sense of the world who did not have either the technology or the intelligence to apply a method to finding out how something in the world operated; instead creating stories that seemed to make sense at the time.
This has been true for many different cultures around the world. For example, the Australian Aboriginals when observing how rivers twist and curve around the country side and the similar patterns a snake creates in the sand determined that a giant snake must have passed through at some stage leaving a large farrow through the land for rain water to accumulate. Whilst we know that this in not the case, I am very sure that many other theories that we hold true at this very moment in time may be laughed at by generations to come.
This makes me wonder... What is to come next in the collective Human Knowledge?
This post was typed using the freewriting method, thus proof-reading is not always accomplished before posting. All efforts will be taken to eventually edit posts.
I see blogging to be one of the best things the internet has brought us. Expressing one's self in a way that is accessible by the whole world has never been so easy.
There once was a time where to express one's self, you had to either create a public spectacle, possibly resulting in troubles with the law and/or towns folk, or you had to take the time to create a medium (such as a newsletter), then distribute it to people who you desired to read it. Blogs however have not always been available on the internet.
In the internet's infant years (the days of command line based computing), there were bulletin boards (BBS) where people were able to post what ever they liked for persons to read. The one downside with this was that BBS was quite limited in the way that you had to know the number of the BBS to access it and often BBS's were limited to a narrow scope of topic resulting in only like-minded persons with already similar points of view.
Todays internet with easy cross pollination between websites due to things such as Search Engines results in a much wider scope of opinion and topic making the gains from discussions much more rewarding.
This ease of communication between individuals via the internet regarding different topics can also be a double edge sword. This is quite evident on websites such as YouTube.
Youtube is a very common place for a phenomenon known as "Trolling." Trolling is the art of commenting on someone else's comment purely for the hope of getting a reaction, or getting the person upset. The most common topic that is "Trolled" is religion. Youtube, much like any diverse community is secular by nature resulting in a place where one should be able to free welcome their religion, or avoid religion. Trolling often occurs when someone comments in favour of their religion on a video that is in no way related to the religion, resulting in others to comment on this comment; offending the original comment writer and thus snowballing from there.
When thinking of the world and religion, I wonder whether the world would be a much better place if religions did not exist. But then, how would this have been possible? For religions have developed from simple-minded people trying to make sense of the world who did not have either the technology or the intelligence to apply a method to finding out how something in the world operated; instead creating stories that seemed to make sense at the time.
This has been true for many different cultures around the world. For example, the Australian Aboriginals when observing how rivers twist and curve around the country side and the similar patterns a snake creates in the sand determined that a giant snake must have passed through at some stage leaving a large farrow through the land for rain water to accumulate. Whilst we know that this in not the case, I am very sure that many other theories that we hold true at this very moment in time may be laughed at by generations to come.
This makes me wonder... What is to come next in the collective Human Knowledge?
This post was typed using the freewriting method, thus proof-reading is not always accomplished before posting. All efforts will be taken to eventually edit posts.
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