Sideband #1: Wow; the interweb is… #1

Sidebands

Sideband posts are miscellaneous thoughts that accompany the main thread of posts.

Think of them as small paths that meander off the main road. Some branch off, go a short ways and die after a short while.

Others are scenic trails that follow along the main road. Quotes is an example of the latter. It’s too early to run into one of the former, but I’ll point out the first one when it arrives.

Wow; the interweb is…

Wow; … posts are reflections on what the interweb is and does. It’s now easy — trivial even — to write information into the interweb. It’s equally easy to search for information.

The exciting part is that some of the information is reliable and based on reality and some of it is opinion and guesswork. I think it makes for interesting observations.

So that’s the deal; Sidebands can happen anytime! (You can think of them as meditative, comparatively infrequent, multi-giga-Tweets.)

Here’s one now:

So I’m researching the quote, “People get the government they deserve,” because I want to use the quote. It’s one of those quotes we all know and like to whip out when it proves our point.

According to the interweb it was said by: Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Helen Zille. And President Taylor supposedly (mis)quoted de Tocqueville.

But the web also says that no one said it, at least definitely not Alexis de Tocqueville. If the others said it, they were probably — like President Taylor — misquoting Tocqueville.

You have to poke around a bit to find a creditable article (well-written plus references!) that gives it up: Joseph de Maistre.

“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle merite.”
(“Every nation has the government it deserves.”)

So there it is: the good and the bad of the interweb, a microcosm keyed by quote.

It’s a rich source of information; you just have to learn to separate the noise from the signal.