Our political parties have been discovering the social media solutions of the Internet. It is nirvana, the answer to a campaign manager’s prayers, or so it seems. It supposedly reaches new and expanded audiences, younger voters and it is inexpensive. Candidates and the elected all have to have their personal web sites, party web site, government web site and they are all interconnected to save time and trouble. Everyone has to have them but few draw much of an audience.
And then there is Twitter and FaceBook and YouTube and their spin-offs. Twitter is embarrassing when you recognize what it says about the shallowness of to-day’s society. YouTube might produce a few gems but there is so much dross, you wonder if it is worth it. FaceBook is becoming commercialized and is challenging web sites in its increasing depth. Mind you those individuals who spread out their lives on FaceBook seem to have a lot of free time that could possibly be spent in more productive pursuits.
And faux web sites and FaceBook pages, Internet trolls, spam, and the just plain badly written, poorly illustrated material leaves all of us commentators and creators swimming against the tide in our own cesspool. Regrettably, the Internet does not seem to be attracting many of the best talents of our North American society.
It was quite surprising to read a Susan Delacourt article in the Toronto Star about a forum in Ottawa this past week. She was intrigued by an event billed as a beginning of conversation on bringing government into the digital age. The billing seemed a bit behind the times. It was almost 25 years ago that there were regular forums in Ottawa under the auspices of Communications Canada and Supply and Services Canada on digital technologies for government departments. One of the new and emerging technologies of interest at the time was the exciting concept of the Internet.
While the Internet was originally proposed and developed at CERN, the European Nuclear Research facility in Switzerland, it was really the agreements on Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that enabled the World-Wide Web to work. CERN provided the standard. We already had extensive experience at the time with the military funded computer networks that spanned North America. Canada’s leadership role in communications and telephony technology also provided another key to making the Internet happen.
Mind you, we might have been a bit too optimistic at the time about the quality of the material that might be made available.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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