I have appointed myself the self appointed advocate of thought. Thought is something we used to do before we had the Internet. I’m sure you have heard about it. It often went hand in hand with reading. People in the old days would get a book and read about a subject and then think about what they had read. Sometimes they would even make decisions based on their thoughts.
The Internet is not in itself inherently bad. The problem is that we have allowed it to take the place of thought. We read things on the Internet and except them for facts without giving them any thought of our own. Sometimes we forget that most of what we read on the Internet was written by board teenagers.
In the old days it was quite difficult to publish your thoughts in to a form that could then be distributed to the general public. First you had to go to the effort of compiling your thoughts into a written form that could be read and comprehended by others. That is a pretty major task. Then you had to find a publisher who would take the time to read your thoughts, and convince him that your thoughts were of enough value to invest thousands of dollars in. Once you had a book published, you had to convince the public that your thoughts had enough merit that they should spend their money and buy your book, and spend their time reading and thinking about your book.
Today all you have to do is click on CS.com and say, “Hey, I heard pine shavings were bad and feeding goldfish was good.” Thousands of people around the world are now telling their friends what the read on the internet.
This is my opinion. I hope you will give it some thought.