How Do We Un-Do Technology

There's an old adage that once somebody gets something for free, you'll never be able to force them to pay for it.

This was true for the music industry, but they've seemed to manage with the advent of song-by-song purchasing through iTunes and the like.

This is the problem for the current news media, specifically those in the antiquated print-media field. You know, newspapers, periodicals, scrolls. All that jazz.

Information is just floating around like all sorts of dust in the wind, leaves in the breeze, twigs in the stream or whatever simile you prefer to reflect an object being swept away by a force it cannot control, like information and the Information Super Highway.

But mixed in with all of those dust, leaf, and twig bits of information floating around there is a plethora of information — I guess one might call it "information," although I don't find it informative or worthwhile — that makes no sense or use. And it's the 24-hour, seven days a week, 52 weeks yearly feeding frenzy that has sprouted up since all of this "information" has become readily available at the click of a mouse.

There are some things that just don't matter.

Take this New York Daily News headline that ran today, oh-so-cleverly titled "Hey Bam, that's not the door!" In short, it outlines the remarkable turn of events that took place outside the White House as Barack Obama, newly sworn-in President and resident of the aformentioned mansion, happened to think a window with the exact same glass panes as the door near that window was in fact the door itself.

"Harf! Harf! Harf! Harf! Harf! Get a load of the moe-ron! Ahuck! Ahuck! This Obama guy ain't to smart neither," bellows anybody who thinks this is laughable or even noteworthy.

Barack Obama is the new-age president who uses the technological advances of such internet pheonomenon as social-networking tools, like Facebook, but he isn't the first to be under the watchful eye of the Big Brother Media that will watch his every move like a hawk.

Bush had a similar experience. or I should say, experiences. The round-the-clock ridicule was unprescedented, albeit W didn't help himself, often fueling the fire with a number of memorable photo ops. But you have to admit, perhaps his image wouldn't be so marred with accusations of possible retardation were the cameras and the microphones not on him at every-single waking and otherwise moment, tuned loud enough for even the most remote and disconnected villages of Africa to hear.

My point is this: Who cares? I mean really, who on God's green Earth cares?

Obama isn't a moron who can't tell the difference between a window and a door. Bush, along with everyone else in the world, has tugged on a locked door. I wish I had a flux capacitor to go back and get rid of all of these little round-the-clock-crap flingers. But alas; people demand it. And get it for free.

But I find it remarkable that when real news happens — say, the first African-American President takes the Oath of Office — they all tend to say the same thing.

But who says it better? That's the question. And no, slap-stick guffaws don't count as quality journalism.