use Perl

• What the advertisers want (Score:1)

  by mary.poppins (3530) on 2005.08.03 15:34 (#42370) Homepage Journal

  I think you're missing an important difference between broadcast media and internet publishing: the latter requires far less up-front capital. The amount of money required to buy and run printing presses, or buy radio spectrum space, limits those channels to publishers with money, or publishers willing to do things (like provide advertising space) for people with money.
  
  So the existing main information sources for people were *already* narrow. Only media paid for by the rich (Moonie Times!) or acceptable to advertisers (NY Times! Don't rock the boat!) was widely available.
  
  Now, people have access to a wider variety of information (go read about the fake moon landing!) and have to do more filtering for themselves. Or, if they're too lazy to do so, they'll just stick to something convenient (cnn.com, or instapundit, or atrios).
  
  The way I'd put it is that now that people do their own filtering, they're free to set up a very narrow personal view of the world -- but the number of possible such views is much wider than it has been before. I think this is a very very good thing. It makes it much harder for powerful people to drop things down the memory hole.

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