I’d have to say that my knowledge of programming is limited at best, its based on the fact that I really don’t know too much about the subject that I can’t use it as a really healthy example, I just have to say what I think goes on. When someone writes a program, if there are pieces of the code that do not work, that cause nothing and help nothing, wouldn’t they usually delete these pieces of code?
Well in the same way, what if other things that were decided to be unneeded were deleted too. I think that this is something interesting that we never thing about because naturally there isn’t much reason for the things that we do if you really think back on it. Look at the system of numbers that we use, there are ten numbers we have, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. These numbers are used to make other numbers of higher value, so even though one is lower than two, a one with a zero behind it is higher than two, now those two numbers combined don’t even equal two, and neither of them is higher, but when paired they are higher.
In the same way you have to think about the fact that numbers are infinite, there’s no set of them, 283,458,949,573,145,284,392,487,352,958,053 is a number even though I don’t know how the hell I would start to say it. But how come one had to be one, and two had to be two. Why is every symbol after 9 a variation of the others? Why couldn’t the symbol for ten be Π instead of the one and zero. Better yet what if at one time it was and that was just erased, would we ever know, would we know that it took place?
There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, now what if at one time there had been thirty? That’s just four extra letters, if they were erased and gone for good we might never know.
I bring this up, not because its plausible because it really isn’t, but because what if one day it is. I saw a report on the TV tonight about censorship of blogs and web journals. In my mind I think that this is a bad thing. Electronic censorship is something that could turn into the big brother type thing that so many were scared of after reading 1984.
What if entire pieces of commentary are dropped from the internet because of the fact they are seen as pointless? Who’s to say what is pointless and what’s not? Billions of opinions float around out there, but few of them have barring on the rest of the world.
Even so, should we do away with the one that are not seen as good enough to exist. Has the information age see us “Drowning in a
What if they start to erase whole people, I mean if the records aren't hard copies anymore, but if they are all computer data? If they decided, somehow, that a person wasn't important enough to let them exist because they didn't do anything and there was no room for them in the systme. They could then just erase all records of someone and they would potentially never have existed as far as the system went. How would you feel about being erased, never having existed except for in the memories of others. Who's to say that with the right technology they couldn't erase memories too?
There you would be, a being without existence, belonging nowhere, physically alive, but dead to the world because as far as the system went, you never existed. This is an extreme case of censorship...
I think that in some cases censorship is important, but in others its nothing but a tool to try and gain control. In age like the one we live in where information is so readily available and so much of this information is out there, it could be easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. But just like a friend said today in class, “I don’t know what people did before the internet…”
I can tell you what they did, they lived in the dark, they lived in fear of not what was coming or where it was coming from, but they lived in the fear that comes with not knowing.
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