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> and a communication tool so powerful that it could abort war. Ha. If anything the clash of cultures that the web facilitates is more likely to start wars.

• cwingrav 9y ago
  Communication can spread many things. If used to connect people and promote understanding, people can keep governments from war. If used to spread rumors and fear, people will push government towards war.
  • laughinghan 9y ago
    That doesn't contradict GP. I think it's quite uncontroversial that telecommunications can do both of those things. The more controversial and, not coincidentally, more interesting question is, on balance, which one of those things does it do? Or is its marginal effect negligible compared to other forces? I think I'm somewhere in the "negligible" to "good" camp, but since I indirectly promote the Internet, I'm interested in reasons to believe it might do more harm than good. Remember The End of History? It's hard to deny that many Western liberal democratic institutions have at least superficially appeared to decline since then, and that at least superficially it appears that telecommunications played a non-negligible role. Certainly all those points are debatable, but it's hard to deny why someone would argue for them, right?
• hu1 9y ago
  Its not the web. Its the like/retweet/upvote/view counters and their impact on human behaviour. Delay or take away the stimulus and herds start behaving very differently than they do currently.