[Or: Can society really look after itself?]
Things have been going a little crazy of late, with respect to the various attitudes people hold towards women. Obviously there’s the whole NRL story going on, then there’s the issues around the NetRegistry and other stands at CeBIT this week. (Props to Kate Carruthers)
Adding to this my own little experience yesterday, where a person waiting to cross Gibbons Street in Redfern said: “Get away from me, you diseased animal”. The response to my “what?” was “you blind diseased animal”.
Charming, no?
Mark Pesce‘s presentation/post Sharing Power (Aussie Rules) delves into the cloud, and the cloud vs. the hierarchy (and is a wonderful piece of writing – maybe the ABC should pay attention? That’s another topic).
However I am forced to wonder that given these sentiments around, whether the cloud is even close to being ready to take over? At times we all want to distance ourselves from various parts of society, I certainly did last night.
Are we in a position to discuss our views, freely and openly, to educate each other and come to a true consensus on what is the acceptable way to behave?
These things happen from time to time, whether its the NRL or Bill Hensen, lots of discussion takes place in the traditional, community and social media, but do we actually come to any kind of consensus or conclusion on these matters? Do we end up educating ourselves, each other and society as a whole? Or do we just leave things hanging?
Not sure, myself… what do you think?
ADM's Blog 
May 16, 2009 at 12:25 am
You’ve hit on an interesting point ADM: everyone thrashes around for a while making lots of noise about these issues whenever they pop up, but how many people’s opinions are moderated and/or changed by all the expelled O2?
In my experience, most people will voice their opinions, then shut their ears. They will use whatever information seeps through to justify their already held opinions and that’s the end of the matter.
As for the cloud taking over, I don’t think that will ever happen. Look at what’s happened over the past six months when the world economy went to the crapper. The general consensus wasn’t ‘Well the only lasting solution to this issue is for us the people to pressure our elected representatives to allow the banks to fail and tighten up the regulation of the ones that make it through the fire’. The response was ‘So, who’s going to fix this? Rudd? Obama?’. Particularly in times of difficulty, humanity wants the hierachy. Whether they need it is a different story, but its what they want.
May 25, 2009 at 3:58 pm
[…] me in particular from this discussion, if only because they can be linked back to my previous posts People Behaving Badly and No Man Left Behind. (At least I think they do). My initial thought was to DM a short form of […]