I think, therefor I *know* !

Whenever I was asked a question that I didn't know the answer to, I'd respond:"My friend Google knows!" And Google never let me down, it was always there, it always responded (swiftly I might add) with pages full of search results! I think I was one of the early adopters, switching from Yahoo and Alta Vista to Google as my favorite search engine.

As the years went by, the internet grew and so did the instruments for obtaining information. Wikipedia started, search engines evolved. Mankind even evolved into the digital era, where electronic information is at least equal to vintage sources like the televised news or the daily journal. I've been calling paper "pre-ascii" since the late 90's I think.

I valued the internet over vintage sources since it's almost impossible to censor and accessible to many. It only takes 1 guard with a cellphone to witness the execution of Sadam Hussein. Imagen a similar video of the JFK-shooter posted on youtube. The evolving and maturing the internet felt like a big step forward for mankind! It would make world a better place!

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." — Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), July 2004

Now let me take you to the cold and factual "present"

Google is not my friend anymore. It's primary objective changed from providing me with the information I requested while funding itself with adds to providing me with the best possible adds wrapped in some decent search results, while optimising the profiling of myself and selling any information gathered... no make that harvested. (read the google privacy policy and get my point)

The idealistic selfproclaimed "sum of all human knowledge", a.k.a. wikipedia, has a secret innercrowd of editors who use wikipedia as their E-peen and decide how the sum of all human knowledge should be interpreted and what is or isn't relevant to add to this sum.

If power and money corrupt the objectivity and validity of information more than ever, than there is NO reason to believe anything you read on the world wide web. Thus information is even less reliable than it was before. And there is no turning back, the digital era is here to stay and even dominates vintage sources of information

On the other hand, there is no use in going back to the pre-ascii age, since information was just as subjective. There have always been innercircles, determining the "best" version of history for humanity or for themselves. The Council of Nicea already decided for you what books the holy bible should and shouldn't include somewhere around 400 A.D.

So here's some wise words ;-) Although in present time you have more information available to you than you ever had before you don't KNOW anything unless you actually gave it some thought yourself, and the general opinion equals the absolute truth no matter what you know.