Informed Bewilderment

It is easy to find yourself in a sandstorm of ideas and data when thinking about the Internet. So when you see something that puts the whole thing in some kind of reasonable perspective, you want to share it. After all, sharing is what the Internet is all about these days.

John Naughton , a professor at the Open University in the U.K., wrote a few months ago "The Internet:Everything You ever need to know" in of The Guardian, a print publication no less. He describes nine steps to understanding what it all means. It is meant to help the reader overcome what he calls "informed bewilderment", or information overload on all things cyber.

In the piece, Naughton writes:

"Many years ago, the cultural critic Neil Postman, one of the 20th century's most perceptive critics of technology, predicted that the insights of two writers would, like a pair of bookends, bracket our future. Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear."

As most things in life tend toward a middle course, hopefully neither author will be proven right.