TMI????

Dan Gillmor gets into the sticking-it-to-the-man aspect of the future of journalism in this
chapter. And this is the part in which I'm most interested.
I see the limited information offered to the public from government organizations and major
corporations as a very real and scary thing. I'm not going to call it fascism, because that's
absolutely ridiculous, but I do believe that what we don't know can hurt us.
I'm glad the internet journalists took it upon themselves to raise a fuss when Trent Lott supported
Strom Thurmond's segregationist ideas. I'm dismayed traditional media needed an impetus to do the
same. This seems like yet another important thing that could have been swept under the rug by
complacency and I'm relieved the bloggers were there to make sure that didn't happen.
I also like the ideas of someone keeping an eye out on the spies. Programs like the Total
Information Awareness lose a lot of their power when their workings as not so secretive as they
would like. John Gilmore put the shoe on the other foot and started spying on the spies, just to
show them how it felt. This move, and others like it, got the program canned, but Gillmor points
out there are others like it. To me, this is a very important and effective use of new media.
On the other hand, when does this flood of information become too much? I know I wouldn't want to
see camera-phone images from inside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And if I want a
head of lettuce, I don't want to know what farm animals nibbled on it in the field: I just want the
cabbage. While too little information can create an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, I believe too
much information can do the same, especially when people start using it against each other.
And once again, Gillmor spends 22 pages extolling the virtues of this "inevitable" cyber-future,
with only scant ruminations on the downsides.
He goes into "benevolent" hacking, but what about the malevolent type? It certainly exists.
To paraphrase Arizona Cardinals, and former Northwestern Wildcats head coach Dennis Green, "If you
want to crown the information-sharing future, crown its (expletive deleted)."