Our world is not what it was. Change is in the air. Specifically, change is in the airwaves. Before the rise of TV, less than 100 years ago, the primary source of news was the newspaper. Before the rise of cheap paper, the primary source of news was the town cryer, or gossip around the tavern, or what have you. Television news has peaked and will soon be a supplemental source of information – the newspaper of the 21st century.

We are taking over news online – a situation that has some advantages, but also some major disadvantages.

On the plus side, a computer user has the ability to find out news and information for her or himself. This is also the negative side. A person who is only interested in hearing what people who share his or her beliefs has to say about world events no longer has any need to be exposed to other ideas.

This is one of the reasons, I believe, that the United States in specific, and the world in general, is destined to become a lot more partisan than it has ever been before. Groups of people with specific beliefs are more able than ever to come to the mistaken conclusion that their way of looking at things is the only way of looking at things because, frankly, they don’t ever have to look at anything else.

News, then, ceases to be the reporting of facts (if it, in fact, ever was that) and becomes the interpretation of facts to support one’s world view. In other words, spin. Spin like mad. Spin like a doggie chasing its tail. A doggie on ice. With a really, really short tail.

The positive thing is that view specific websites largely cut across national boundries. The negative thing is that they create new idealogical boundries.

I propose that in the long run, power will reside in not who controls the information, but in who can best understand how different groups of people spin things. By placing a pre-spin on information, you can sometimes control how the information is spined. This means we will be entering an age of meta-spin, where the spin itself is more important than the information or the way the information is interpreted.

Obviously, we’ve already sort of entered this world a little bit, a world where the sheep really do learn how to chant “four legs good, two legs better” without question until people asking for the truth are drowned out.

Anyhow, you can be stronger by reading information from as many different sources as you can. Try to see how things are being spun from as many angles as possible and then, if you are lucky, you might be able to see through the spin and get a picture of the top inside.