The diminishing isolated populisms

This week on BlogTalkRadio I had the opportunity to interview John Battelle. You can read up on John or read his blog, Searchblog. He offered a good discussion on information availability, social networks and what he calls "conversational media".

Here's where you can listen to our talk.

John spoke on the show about how interconnected social groups were becoming. So, from a chapter called The Computer and the Counterculture in the book The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak, I pulled this quote. I believe it describes a fundamental change in individual isolation which is very powerful as most of us imagine:
"Both the quantity and content of available information is set by centralized institutions -- the press, TV, radio, news services, think-tanks, government agencies, schools and universities -- which are controlled by the same interests which control the rest of the economy. By keeping information flowing from the top down, they keep us isolated from each other. ...Computer technology has thus far been used ...mainly by the government and those it represents to store and quickly retrieve vast amounts of information about huge numbers of people...It is this pattern that convinves us that control over the flow of information is so crucial."

Resource One Newsletter April 1974, Berkeley, CA

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