> I can't count the number of things in the past year that I've told my parents about (avid news watchers) and they had never heard a peep of it.

And what were the results?

A friend from HN (whom I'll leave anonymous, simply because I don't know if he wants his part in this to be known or not) was sharing information about what was going on in Libya with another friend, and mentioned that a virus was spreading through the opposition chat rooms. The virus made its way over to me for analysis, since its first stage was .NET (which I've got a good bit of experience dealing with). I broke the protections, wrote an antivirus, and within 48 hours or so, we had a detector/removal tool spreading throughout the opposition.

That is what spreading information is for. It's connecting the right people to the right problem.

Edit: I left out one key piece of information. The virus was explicitly written not to cause damage, or join a botnet, or anything of the sort; its sole purpose was to gather usernames, real names, and as much contact information as possible for the user hit with the virus. While we don't know who created this virus, it's entirely possible that it was created with the express purpose of identifying/locating certain members of the opposition.

Nothing, because they didn't have any influence in those realms, either... But if I'd said nothing, I could have guaranteed that nothing would happen. At least this way, there was a chance.

I think that at issue is not the intentions involved, but the side effects. What many people are actually doing when they think they are "spreading knowledge" is just glorified gossip[1]. Not because people intend to, but because it's just as easy to do so as to spread more important information. The network won't stop you. The people won't stop you. If your intent is to do something more or other than gossip, you have to stop yourself. (As with any number of other things.)

That is, if you care to. I don't think anybody should feel obligated to care at all about any given issue. But it seems like a lot of people feel trapped between feeling bad about not caring and feeling bad about not doing anything, and squeeze out of that by feeling good about talking about it a lot on the internet. It's one thing to be informed, and to make informed decisions--to do some verb with that information--but if you consider echoing or spreading to be a valid verb for a given kind of information, then you will never have enough. At that point you're just a memetic router somewhere between Maine and Texas[2], busy being idle.

[1]:Or scuttlebut, chit-chat, small talk, bull sessions, chatting around the water cooler, bar, or bong. It's a vital part of human social interaction, but as Winer says, not a revolutionary act.

[2]:http://www.bartleby.com/73/1540.html

And what did your parents hear, from numerous sources other than you?

The problem is that it is not enough to hear the truth. One must also fail to hear the falsehoods. When those falsehoods are cheap to create, and cheap to distribute, and the people pushing them have more resources, it's pretty difficult to consistently tune them out.

And that somehow makes it better for me to shut up about the truth? No. Being 1 more voice speaking the truth is always worthwhile.

The internet makes it harder to determine the truth. If not careful, then anyone can start spreading falsehoods against their best intentions. Nobody wants you to shut up about the truth, but your ability to judge what is "true" is greatly impaired by the cheap (and legal) proliferation of falsehoods.

I am impatient with this type of argument. Falsehoods proliferated just fine before the Internet; truth seems a more fragile flower. I think we've got a net positive.

That it makes you better-informed than your parents is just saying the Internet is useful -- it is!

So is CNN, and it was pretty amazing in its day, which I remember. (The first gulf war.)

It's just neither is the place for revolutions.

If there's something after the Internet, that may possibly be subversive.

The revolution which CNN televised was Tiananmen. Just about everything since has been pretty much a production, Desert Shield and Desert Storm spectacularly so (e.g. very little in depth coverage of carnage on the Highway of Death, and lots of guncamera footage of smart bombs over Baghdad).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_death

Unfortunately it seems that sometimes too much information leads to apathy, if we know all the problems of the world our ability to affect change in any single one seems diminished. Maybe it would be better to know less and focus on that instead.

This is the wrong conclusion. Yes, there's a lot more information out there now. It's a noisier environment. Yes, that can lead to information overload, which can lead to apathy and short-termism.

But the challenge isn't in knowing which sources to "turn off." It's in knowing which sources to trust and to emphasize over the others. It's in separating the signal from the noise. But on the balance, it's generally a good thing that we've got more information rather than less.