The President of the US has become the latest critic of Apple when he mentioned the iPad during one of his speeches over the weekend. To be fair though, he didn’t just choose Apple for criticism and there wasn’t a single mention of Flash. No, President Obama was more concerned with the fact that devices like the iPad are making information a distraction. He argues that instead of knowledge being a way to empower us it has just become yet another form of entertainment. In other words, the dream that the internet might liberate us all in the age of knowledge might actually be making us dumber than ever.
Thinking about it, President Obama might actually have a point here. It would be wrong to blame Apple for the problem but there certainly seems to be a lot of ignorance out there in the cloud. The problem is that instead of allowing people to share knowledge and experience the internet has developed into thousands of echo chambers where people gather in their own little groups and just reinforce each other’s ignorance. The majority of people seem to have little interest in verifying facts and instead of using the internet as a way to discover the world they want to be told how to think. They select a few sources they trust and put their faith in this. In a way it is understandable, most of us don’t have enough time to research things ourselves. That is why in the States you can have somebody like Sarah Palin being accepted by many people as an expert on everything – a very worrying state of affairs.
Obama is probably speaking the truth, but it is doubtful that many people are listening. They are all too dependent on other people to tell them how to interpret his words.
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