Idiots beware.
I thought everyone knew search engines can cause a "hit" to register on the pages for which the search results contain a listed match. The SE needs to make sure the page is still there or else note that it can only show you a cached version. The SE is going to leave your search string as its calling card. That trace is how I know there are some patheticly twisted morons, utter American peasants, sitting in front of keyboard and screen somewhere out there in the Ozarks or Nebraska or Georgia.
i heard that they can actually build a womb and it is used for gay males that want childrenThat search string doozy, hauled up in a recent scan of the logs, did not produce one second of page reading. I'd be surprised if it did, we use a lot of polysyllabic vocabulary here.
Quite contrary to my own pontificating, this gives the old saw about "no such thing as a dumb question" a severe test.
So, they "heard" this amazing fact! From whom, one wonders. Perhaps it was a joke? Otherwise, this person seems as dumb as their friend or their preacher or their Aryan nation news site or whatever drooling feeb repeats such quivering ignorance. It is for the likes of this simpleton and their sources of poisoned nonsense that we effete snobs with our diplomas and newspaper subscriptions generically refer to the villages and trailer parks where such "knowledge" spontaneously appears like mildew on a shower curtain as "Bumf__k, [insert benighted red state]". I don't want that particular increment on my hit counter. Cheese us crackers! No wonder this country goes for Bush and his wars. Not even extreme youth excuses a moment of entertaining such harmful drivel without damning the inattentive or hate-filled parent.
Art Linkletter would be jealous: Google could feed these clunkers, of which we assume they have an endless supply, into the scripts of an animated or synthetic speech reality/talk show: "Googlers ask the darndest things", laugh track optional. It would cost them zip to produce and it would out shine the content of any half dozen wingnut talk shows you could name. If I wanted to, I could pepper my pages with the vocabulary hot buttons of the ignorant and the fearful and have a field day fetching up all their misspelled perplexity from my hit counter. That would comprise a sort of high tech political stethoscope or polling mechanism, a kind of scheissgeist to balance google's zeitgeist, but I don't advise you to stick a stethoscope in that particular smelly orifice of the elephant.
There, that ought to have stepped on enough toes to keep me in the dog house for a long time. I think I have achieved catharsis. Can't we all have a "Rush" moment? Deep breath, sigh, deep breath...
As a self proclaimed liberal, I blush at my own intimation that there is a class distinction, hinging around intelligence or education, that separates me and the liberal fellowship from some unwashed and dangerous "them". On the other hand, don't we all have to ask "What is our problem in America?" How is it that our nation can be manipulated into electing [or believing we elected] a government that every day's papers report to be easily bought, shallow, idiotic, sectarian bigots; unrepresentative representatives and leaders who only mislead and squander our wealth? Neither poverty per se, nor lack of education make one ignorant. Nor do these, in and of themselves, cause a person to not see what it is that grinds them down amid a world of advertised plenty. There are averages, there are generalizations, there are stereotypes to tell us such things as the disaffected "angry white men" or "single issue voters" exist. There are theories that greed knows how to prey upon these hypothetical blocks of voters by owning the media which paints their world: pander to their fears while actually feeding those fears, problem and solution all in one unending broadcast.
All of these characterizations avoid the individual. The great hope of our era is that we have a communication tool which could allow any single person to converse with any single other person or allow each of us to seek a personally tailored source of information without abridgment or interference from any other power. Individual, meet world. World, meet individual. Now couldn't the internet be great? What if my blighted enquirer got an answer from google that put them straight? What would equip the asker to sort the 10,000 "answers" into the decent, the dumb, the dangerous and the mere digital detritus? What would make the internet live up to its promise of democratic individuality and completely informed citizenship? I got news for everyone who now toils to dispose of the first amendment: whatever it is, its not the internet. We can just leave the internet alone. Its the individual who comes to this media unready to see anything but agreement and confirmation that scuttles the hopeful premise.
Eradicating the digital divide is an issue of social justice and equal opportunity that the US actually could fulfill. But pulling everyone under the big electronic tent means EVERY IDEA and all nonsense will be there too. Teach the children well.
8 comments:
Part of the problem, to my mind, is that ignorance passed from parent to child is protected by the "sacred" right of parents to indoctrinate their children any way they see fit. Can simple exposure to real facts about the nature of the world or clsoing the digital divide compete with such earlier programming?
I don't know...I see an awful lot of static ignorance persisting even among those who have access to the modern communication tools.
I know Cul. I didn't have a real answer there. I even wonder if the people in whom the ignorance and fear have lodged for generations would understand that there is a real problem there.
Good point.
The moron can pick whatever pace suits him as long as he isn't deliberately trying to impede mine and as long as the ignorance involved isn't maliciously wilful. Otherwise, its "loose the techno dogs!" :)
It's kind of an interesting statement though - notice how women have been completely taken out of the equation? 'Built womb','gay males'. I wonder how much it has to do with the fear of the feminine.
Sadly, it doesn't have much to do with education, intelligence and social class because you can find all 3 in varying degrees on both sides.
Carrie:
Yeah, with only those words to go on, you could turn that question a few different ways. The alternatives that come to mind revolve around guessng WHAT exactly this pathetic individual is worried about. If it were "fear of the feminine" [which I invite you to define or give examples], do you suppose the "person" [we do NOT know with certainty the gender of this person, and I purposely changed a technical detail to put their IP address out of reach] was conscious of having that fear?
Ignorance clearly is NOT bliss here, the less one has learned, the more one can believe or worry might be true.
It's like George W. Bush is Jim Jones or Shoko Asahara these days...
There's some bad chemicals in people's brains...
GS,
I don't want to detract from the importance and poignancy of your post here and your discussion, which was indeed fascinating and lively, but I want to point out something I learned about stat meters.
I read that the sitemeter will register 0 seconds when someone only views one page on your site, regardless of how long they view that page. They might be reading all your current posts for an hour, or they might have arrived and gone away immediately. But if they don't click on a second page within your site (or on any of your links outward), the meter doesn't know how long they were at your site and it will register zero seconds. A more complete explanation might be in your sitemeter company's FAQs.
I think there is a lot of misuse of or over-reliance on stat meters by laymen. I use my stats to get a general feeling as to how people maneuver within my small business site and to get a general feeling of how they might have found me, but it's all general information and I assume nothing in the long run. There are some things you cannot know from stats, and there are indeed many inferences that should not be made by looking at stats.
That said, I will add with agreement that I too have had some whopper search strings that make me think someone's elevator stalled out at the third floor.
Jan
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