An interesting thought, and one that brings to mind some of the risks in blurring the boundary between “tool user” and “tool”: Not to long ago I read a little news article about how a bunch of democrat geeks managed to tweak enough pages so that when you typed in “bogotefd idiot” ( or some similar pejorative) into google, it returned with George Bush. Then some republican geeks did the same thing with one of the democratic candidates as the target/victim.

All harmless fun and sillyness, and corrected by Google as soon as they found out about it with a change to their search algorithms. But… and here’s the kicker, what happens when a significant portion of society uses google and other online sources as suplamental memory and intelligence? Not as a handy reference but through habit and seamless intefaces as part of what they KNOW? Then someone with the ability to spoof those online sources, even for a little while, can in effect alter teh memories and knowledge of society.

You think urban myths are hard to kill now, imagine when people have “proof”. 😉

People have always used propoganda, advertising, control of schools and libraries to try and re-write history. To mold the way people think for their own ends. And it works. But it is a slow and cumbersome process and doesn’t allow fine detailed control. We have ( or most of us should, ) a certain skepticism and distrust of media and other outside sources. We take some convincing befoe we accept as fact what they tell us…or at least all of what they tell us. But we don’t apply the same rigorous filter to our inside thoughts. But if people become so intergrated into the online that they start to rely on it as if it were their own memory and knowlege, then anyone that can change that has in effect mastered thought control.