=for timestamp
Mi Feb 14 18:13:34 CET 2007

=head2 31. Hausaufgabe

=head3 The "infinite amount of information" provided by cable TV and the
Internet -- a blessing or a curse?

Television and the Internet -- or media in general -- play a downright
predominant role in our modern society. Television receivers exist in 95
percent of all German households and 98 percent of American households,
according to [[WikiDeFernsehenInDeutschland]] and [[WikiDeFernsehenInDenUSA]]
respectively; 68 percent of German's adults have direct access to the Internet
([[Heise68]]).

Because of their plangent distribution, consequences caused by television and
the Internet have to be reflected upon very seriously -- much more seriously
than would be needed in a society not permeated by medias.

In the following, I'll ponder the question whether the "infinite amount of
information" provided by television and the Internet
are to be considered a blessing or a curse. This cannot be decided in general,
of course; instead I'll give several arguments for both views.

=head4 "Infinite amount of information" provided by television and the Internet
as a curse

This section lists arguments for the view that the "infinite amount of
information" provided by television and the Internet is a curse. It is divided
in arguments concerning the quality of the obtainable information, the
accessibility of television and the Internet, and miscellaneous other arguments.

=head5 Quality of the obtainable information

To gauge the relevance of the "infinite amount of information" obtainable, one
should first contemplate the quality of the information broadcasted on
television and downloadable on the Internet.

=head6 Unintentional misinformation

The most common cause of wrong information on television and the
Internet is probably constituated by unintentional oversights. As it is
acknowledged that it takes approximately ten years to become an expert on any
given topic [unfortunately I have a lost the reference to a study supporting
this statement], information is often compiled by laymen who have only a rough
knowledge on the relevant area.

This argument is often used against Wikipedia, rendering Wikipedia as full of
errors. Other examples include the presentation of scientific relations in
so-called "popular science"; these explications are often simplified to a great
extent -- one popular misconception of natural sciences, namely that natural
sciences Explain The World instead of just providing accurate (but in no case
exact or true!) models, forms the root of the discussions on Intelligent Design
in the USA.

=head6 Unrepresentative information

The quality of the information provided by television and the Internet is
further downgraded by the unrepresentative assembly of the corresponding
authors: The opinions and views broadcasted and displayed on television
respectively the Internet are influenced by the views of the persons in
charge.

This problem surfaces especially on the Internet -- the people who publish on
the Internet obviously belong to the group of people who have the ability to
publish on the Internet. This means that the views of, say, the typical
90-year-old grandparents are under-expressed.

=head6 Directed disinformation

Directed disinformation has the potential to degrade the information quality in
most severe ways. The sources of such disinformation range from companys which
"exaggerate" facts about their products over politicians to whole countries
which enact over a consolidated apparatus spreading targeted disinformation.

A prominent example of such directed disinformation is the actively enforced
censorship in the People's Republic of China: If you search for "Tiananmen",
the name of the place the 1989 massacre took place (in which several hunderds of
people were killed [[WikiEnTiananmen]]), Google Germany presents you
with a host of pictures of tanks [[GoogleDeTiananmen]]. By stark contrast,
Google China shows pictures of smiling tourists [[GoogleCnTiananmen]].

=head5 Accessibility of the information

The Internet introduces new technological barriers to the accessibility of the
information. To access all the information of the Internet, one not only needs
appropriate hardware (which, of course, costs money), an Internet provider free
of censorship, and the physical abilities to use computers, but knowledge on
using computers as well.

This means that certain groups of people are excluded -- for example older
people who can't read computer screens or handle the keyboard or mouse
appropriately and disabled persons.

Finding useful information on the Internet is further impeded by its vast size;
it takes practice to develop the keen sense necessary to use search engines
effectively.

=head5 Potential harm to children by pornographic content

To the "infinite amount of information" retrievable on the Internet and
broadcasted on television, pornographic content are a part of. It is believed
that pornographic pictures and movie constitute the greatest part of all
Internet traffic [[PornTraffic]]. (But note that the amount of traffic as
measured in (peta) bytes is not a good measure of the proportion of
pornographic sites, as images and movies take up much more space (i.e., bytes)
than texts do.)

Considering the television programme broadcasted at night, one obtains
similar impressions.

Barriers to pornographic contents on the Internet can be circumvented even by
the average child in many cases, as it's technically challenging to
automatically classify the raw information retrieved from the Internet as
information with pornographic content -- computers do not (yet?) have access to
the semantic level of information.

The few necessarily-not-perfect-but-deemed-to-be-sufficient techniques to
automatically block access to porn sites which exist today can easily be
fooled.

=head5 Sensory overload caused by the "infinite amount of information"

The probably most important problem caused by the "infinite amount of
information" broadcasted on the 500-and-counting channels of television and
retrievable on the Internet is probably the sensory overload intimately
associated with the way television and the Internet are used.

Many studies show that in the so-called process of "zapping", in which
individual channels are rarely watched for longer than a few seconds, the
senses are overly stressed.

In the case of the Internet, the problem is
slightly less severe, as active instead of passive use is necessary for the
problem to manifest. Also, as websites used to be mostly visual-only, only the sense
of sight was affected. With the increasing popularity of movie websites like
YouTube [[YouTube]], this last point has lost validity, unfortunately.

=head4 "Infinite amount of information" provided by television and the Internet
as a blessing

The previous section outlined arguments for the view that the "infinite amount of
information" of television and the Internet are a curse. As with any
technology, down- and upsides coexist; in the following, I'll elaborate on some
of the advantages of the "infinite amount of information" obtainable, with a
slight focus on the role of the Internet.

I'll not mention that television with its M<\text{500}^+> channels and the
Internet with its millions of sites are superb examples of countermeasures
against boredom.

=head5 Economic advantages

One of the reasons for the wide-spread distribution of television and the
Internet is certainly that they result in economic advantages. In societes
governed by the principles of free market economy, economic considerations
carry a lot of weight.

=head6 Economic advantages through the use of television and the Internet as
means of distributing advertising material

There exists a wide spectrum of possible types of advertising on television and
the Internet. More encompassing than ads in printed media, thousands of targets
can be reached very time- and cost-efficiently.

=head6 Economic advantages through the possibiliy of efficient trans­ac­tions

Many companies, especially companies which operate in the logistical sector,
profit from the very efficient conductability of transactions attainable on the
Internet. Commiting and equating deals (i.e., effectively rolling back) are
matters of seconds; one can act to new information in a timely matter.

=head5 Quality of the information obtainable

Contrary to what I said above, the information broadcasted on television and
receivable on the Internet is of a very high niveau -- presuming that one knows
the right ruses to distinguish high-quality from low-quality information.

Wikipedia, for example, is a source of very high quality. Barring few problem
areas, Wikipedia is factual and actual (attributes stemming from the
encouraged possibility that anyone can improve Wikipedia), and attains a good
structure by the extensive use of links.

Grassroot and citizen journalism is covered on so-called blogs: independent
journalists can publish their results without pressure resulting from
commercial and political interests as they often influence more regularly
edited print media magazines. [[WikiEnCJ]]

=head5 Advantages -- blessings -- resulting from the decentral nature of the
Internet

These new movements profit from the technical difficulty the creation of a
point of central control over the Internet would have.

Because of the Internet's decentral nature, it is infeasible that a single
company or county could gain control over the entire Internet; thus the
Internet is the ideal medium for guaranteeing the continued validity of one of
the most fundamental human rights, namely the freedom of speech.

In addition to providing a great platform for asynchronous communication, i.e.
the point in time of creation differs from the point in time of reading (mails,
blogs), the Internet serves as the basis for a variety of real-time chat
services.

Examples of serious uses of chats include real-time updates about the Gulf War
in 1991 (an archive may be found at [[IRCGulf]]) and live reports about the
unstable situation in Moscow during the coup against Boris Yeltsin in 1993,
disclosed directly by the affected people and not layered through several news
agencies. [[IRCRT]]

Finally, contemplated from an ideological point of view, one might have the
belief that it's better that information is stored decentrally, accessible to
everyone, instead of being property of a few rich millionaires and heads of
states.

=head4 Conclusion

I remark that I<in conclusio>, the benefits of the "infinite amount of
information" provided by television and the Internet outweigh the downsides. To
a more complete report on this topic advantages and disadvantages of television
and the Internet itself, not the "infinite amount of information" provided,
would have to be considered.

Important parts of such an extended exposure to the topic would include: the social
and sanitary consequences of daily use of television and the Internet; an
I<en detail> explication of threats emerging from the Internet (the corresponding
buzzwords are "phishing" and "cracking") and risks for the Internet (including China's
ongoing censorship as a political component and various technical difficulties
arising from the continued exponential development of the world population).

=begin latex

\begin{thebibliography}{50}
  \bibitem{E31WikiDeFernsehenInDenUSA}
  \url{http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernsehen_in_den_USA}

  \bibitem{E31WikiDeFernsehenInDeutschland}
  \url{http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernsehen_in_Deutschland}

  \bibitem{E31WikiEnCJ}
  \url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism}

  \bibitem{E31WikiEnTiananmen}
  \url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989}

  \bibitem{E31IRCGulf}
  \url{http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/Gulf-War/}

  \bibitem{E31GoogleDeTiananmen}
  \url{http://images.google.com/images?q=Tiananmen&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=images&ct=title}

  \bibitem{E31GoogleCnTiananmen}
  \url{http://images.google.cn/images?complete=1&hl=zh-CN&ie=GB2312&q=Tiananmen}

  \bibitem{E31Heise68}
  \url{http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/83774}

  \bibitem{E31IRCRT}
  \url{http://www.mirc.com/irc.html}

  \bibitem{E31PornTraffic}
  \url{http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051007.html}

  \bibitem{E31YouTube}
  \url{http://www.youtube.com/}
\end{thebibliography}

=end latex