A few words on words....

I like words. They enable you to acquire cookies, more specifically, they enable you to acquire Fig Newtons (it's always about the Newton).

Lately, thoughts about words have been rattling around in my brain, occasionally bumping into a brain cell or two. This of course causes more words to happen and now I need to leak them out of my brain to create some room in there for more important pursuits like how to not glue myself to the PVC pipe when I fix the AC drain line in the next few days.

The word that started this was "liberal". I recently read Friedrich Von Hayek's 'The Road to Serdom'. In it he uses the word "liberal" 127 times (thank you Kindle search feature). Judging from the context in which he uses "liberal" it would seem that the definition of the word then (1944) closely resembles what we would call today a "free market capitalist".

I can't find any use of the word "liberal" in current writings that would come close to meaning "free market capitalist." In a mere 65 years the generally accepted meaning of a word has pretty much been reversed.

He also mentions the deliberate shifting of the usage of words was how the socialist in Germany created conditions that allowed the nastiest socialist of them all to be elected and carry out his atrocities. Yes, Hayek flatly states the Nazi regime was economically a socialist (state control of the means of production) regime using fascist political control to push acceptance of it's failing economic policies.

Another thought about words that keeps pushing to the outer edges of the spin cycle that is my brain concerns the reach ordinary people have with their words in today's world of blogs, twitter, facebook, and self publishing. This thought inspired by another book I finished recently, "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman.

Mr. Friedman discusses how technological improvements have made the world more even, or flatter. In the not so distant past, for an ordinary person to get their personal viewpoint out to the world beyond their family and friends required convincing a series of people to risk certain amounts of money to publish or broadcast some version of that viewpoint. This risk of money often allowed these people an editorial right over the final product.

Today, through the use of blogs, email, twitter, and the self publishing of etexts, a person of modest means can give access to their viewpoint to a world wide audience. This accessibility to a broader audience is starting to have consequences to the "professional" purveyors of information. In some ways this technological advance has brought us back to a time prior to electricity or the printing press.

Think about how news traveled prior to electricity or cheap printed materials. A person would meet up with someone who had just come from somewhere else and talk to them about the happenings in that somewhere else. Then the information would be passed on to others the person knew or met. Such information transfer was fraught with possibilities for inaccuracy and filtering but people managed to integrate the various versions they received and made decisions in their lives based on this amalgamated "truth".

Somewhere along the line, as printed material became more widespread, and more so with the invention of electronic information transfer technologies, classes of information workers developed. By the end of the 20th century we find the generally accepted belief that the only "real" news is that which has been gathered, washed, dried, fluffed, and folded by "professionals".

Then a series of endearingly nerdy brains, fueled by high caffeine drinks figured out how to line up electrons in a fashion that allowed ordinary people, or even cranky, hill dwelling libertarians, to take their viewpoint and news out way beyond who they could trap in a corner at a cocktail party or backyard BBQ.

This caused some, but by no means all, of the professional information workers to go to high freak mode. It doesn't take a very in depth perusal of traditional print or broadcast type of information transfer entities to find claims that these "amateur" information transferers are "inaccurate, lacking in context, and politically slanted." Which is all true... but probably no more so that these traditional information sources. Show me an information outlet that this doesn't apply to and I'll show you a radio station in east New Mexico who only programs the slow reading of PTA minutes.

These new "news" outlets seem to me to mirror how we gather and use information from sources more close to us. How do we gather information about things that happen within our circle of friends and family... we hear the story (or receive an email about it) from various members of our circle, each having a slightly differing viewpoint. We weigh each of the versions according to it's source (because we all know that Uncle Fred will always blame everything on the Democrats and Cousin Sally will minimize how bad things are because she "just don't like to think about things like that".) and make whatever decisions we need to make based on our amalgamated version.

Now news of the broader world can come to us in this fashion... from many different sources, each with its own perception, slant, and flavor. For those thinking this is a really bad trend, please explain one thing... How can any media outlet accurately and unbiasedly report the missteps of a politician that they are on record as recommending as the best person for a particular elected position? When information is passed through any human brain it is altered.

All the thoughts didn't quite leak out but I've noticed that my use of the word "few" in the title probably wasn't very accurate... Then those who know me know that "Migoi sure does like words...he uses a lot of them"..

..take care.. t