Internet: History As It Happens Beats Textbook Teachings

Greatest Contemporary Value For YOU: Experience NOW !!

Image Courtesy: antesoft.com

(SALEM) - One of the world`s leading historians, Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel J. Boorstin, is famous for his favorite theme that most Americans miss the momentous meanings of events through which they live.

`Too much, too many, too fast, too complex", he rightly contends regarding the unavoidable `communications surround" today -- and most of us would agree, while worried about the consequences we now recognize we cannot know contemporaneously.

History is the organized summary of situations, composed only after `the dust has settled" and the parts impacting one on the other have settled into some more meaningful pattern.

That is precisely what is denied us today with the now surely overwhelming flood of news, issues, problems, demands --and many desperate threats-- at every level in contemporary life.

That delay-in meaning, called `history", has been the unavoidable consequence of all available communications channels throughout the ages: Forced to fall behind contemporary time while preparing the message of meanings, later; and then providing some sure way to transmit it to those already feeling its consequences.

BUT modern technologies --beginning with radio for words and whatever wisdom they could carry, then with instantaneous `SEE-it-happening-NOW !" television-- have literally and forever changed our world.

These `new technologies" have given us the prime and potent power to watch-and-listen (and thus, inevitably, learn) what we will, as we choose, when we choose -- for whatever that can mean for millions now more rapidly informed than in any previous century.

That is the true value --far beyond dollar and/or any other economic measure-- for what is now forerun by Wi-Fi considerations in Salem, by the City Council and others demonstrably involved in any effective application of existing technologies.

That is why we must watch and comment and consider-- and help in any way we can summon to do so-- when the City Council, guided by the good efforts of Councilors Brent DeHart and T.J. Sullivan and City staff, make those searing-consequential decisions soon re the existing venture Open.Org, now about to be phased out.

Funding salvaged from that leading-venture can surely now be devoted to larger-uses-yet, given wise study and well-informed decision.

Can you imagine the immeasurable true-value for every Salem home if low(er)-cost connection to the inestimable wealth of information, translatable into working knowledge and eventually into `education" at the most practical levels, was available to all Salem households ?

Can you contemplate what that could mean for those faced with otherwise insuperable problems for progress from poor and denied-advantages status to self-improved and continuing-to-learn progress, in many situations and on deeply democratic issues and demands? English-language? Social customs? U.S. laws?

Working responsibilities? Children`s learning-helps?

Can you imagine the warm and comforting feelings and solid support felt-and-appreciated, if and when parents are able to sit simply facing a computer screen and participate with any child facing home-work problems ?

Given such access to the whole world of knowledge, ready-and-waiting right at the single click-of-the-mouse or simpler, that is what you can expect and possess and enjoy -- and put to work for you and your family, when this comes-to-pass.

Will it happen here in Salem ? Why NOT ? !! It is already underway in Portland, and across this nation.

Sure beats any printed-page textbook I have ever encountered.