What truly worries me is what we, as a society, are blindly willing to accept as "necessary security precautions" that wind up being abused by those in power. The vast majority of this stuff (CCTV on every street corner, wildly expanded police powers, intrusions into our private lives) are ill-conceived and don't provide the protections that were promised in the first place. Bruce Schneier calls it Security Theatre.

The average Londoner is photographed 300 times per day, but is the city truly more safe than it was 10 years ago?

I don't know what to do, but I do know what not to do: don't panic about perceived threats and hold your government to account for their claims. Ask questions and for God's sake, don't blindly accept "that's classified" as an answer.

<i>how far could people go in immersing themselves into the unimportant and the abandonment of individual privacy while still being functional in a democracy? </i>

Based on personal experience, I'd say quite far. The depth of my ignorance is astounding (I get my news from fark and my politics from here) but yet I vote in every election - federal, provincial, municipal.

What the author of the clip perhaps is failing to recognize is the level of literacy of the people back then. Certainly in 1865 most literate people read the paper from front to back but that was because there was little else to do for entertainment. In England in 1841, 33% of men and 41% of women signed their marriage certificates with a mark because they were completely illiterate. Granted, the literacy level rose to 91% in America by the late 1800s however I am sure what they based that number on was an abiliity to read the words and not necessarilty comprehend the big words.

I have zero interest in local affairs, ribon cuttings, obits or similar stories so I never buy a paper unless I need packing materials but I do use an RSS reader at home to filter news of interest. I don't think this makes me unaware so much as selective.

<i>...little else to do for entertainment...</i><p>This is a sort of presentism, for lack of a better word, that I do not think is actually the case. People tend to fill their lives rather than sit around wishing it was 50 years from now so we all had a jet-pack. People in their given era were both busy and capabile in the past, were aware of complex political, religious ideas and jingoisms. They talked and met. They also did things we do not do (aside from die earlier) such as participate in less organized communal recreations (and not just cheese rolls) that we have dumped for the either the formal or the individual and the electronic. No point in history was a better golden era as a cold could kill you but thinking of other eras were filled with the bored and dumb or the grim and presbyterian does not bear up. This is not a golden era either.

My parents still read the paper, both the local one and the provincial one (which I guess you could call the Telegraph-Journal). Which is a good thing, as otherwise I wouldn't have known that Chaleur Air went out of business.

"They also did things we do not do (aside from die earlier) such as participate in less organized communal recreations (and not just cheese rolls) that we have dumped for the either the formal or the individual and the electronic."
And it is exactly this statement, plus the 'golden era' bit, that puts me, apparently, in the minority on this. Sure, people showed up to listen to Lincoln speak for 6 hours. But some historians, can't remember where exactly I read this(so I might get simply some demerits for unsupported claim, and maybe some penalty box time), talked about how it was simply an event that everyone attended. Sorta like rubberbecking for highway accidents. They simply couldn't not go because this was a major event---even if at 60 people back from the podium you couldn't hear the speaker, you simply had to go as it was history in the makin'.

So I'm not sure if I'm buying this 'people are dumber and less involved today' line. THings evolve. Things change. Some ways for the better and some ways worse. We do have the 'group projects' thing. While not a cheese roll or a greased pole it is a community gathering, sorta, if you're feeling generous about the lines of definition of a community gathering.

Speaking of which. Are we going to have elections and a membership drive? What happened to the Winter Meetings to decide what will replace the excellent '...and Coco Crisp' line of last year? Hmmmm? (pout)

Gorthos,

England lagged the New World generally and the British North American colonies specifically when it came to education and literacy. By 1840 80% of all Upper Canadian adults were literate.

As to "reading the words but not necessarily comprehending the big words" I don't think one quite has a grasp of the people one is patronizing.

Prior to 1850 Upper Canada had the largest number of newspapers and the highest per capita readership of anywhere in the Empire. Further, these newspapers, generally six broadside pages of six or seven columns each, consisted almost entirely of debates from the legislative assembly or reprinted speeches of parliamentarians. The people of 19th century Upper Canada clamoured for this information and debated it rigorously. Newspapers were regularly read aloud at inns and taverns, which became such hotbeds of political discussion that members of the Executive Council attempted to pass laws ensuring the loyalty of owners. The level of discourse in these papers generally puts that of our papers today to shame.

For a more complete view of the the level and widespread readership of Upper Canadian newspapers and political debate I suggest:

Jeffrey McNairn, "The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854." (UTP:2000).

Ry: I am with you on the people showed up because it was "history in the makin'" bit. IMHO literacy, simple literacy, as basic as is needed to be called "literate" doesn't exactly make a group of people such that they should be considered 'less dumb' than today. Imagine if almost every single person in Canada only had a grade 12 education, because that is what I am sure it would be like back then.

I read somewhere once (now I tread the waters of unsupported claims) that a person graduating high school today has had their head filled with 60% more information than a person who graduated in 1940. I can only imagine the comparison to 1840.

People who gathered en masse because it was the sheepish herd thing to to were not better off or more educated than today just because they chose to do community based things and read newspapers. IMHO.

I agree with Alan 11:14 for the most part. Ry also has a valid point though as I have noticed by way of air shows. Here in Toronto the air show crowd is largely males (+ spouses). In London and smaller burgs it's much more co-ed and not at all unusual to see women of all ages arriving singly or with other women. It's also more expensive in London (you pay to get onto a cordoned part of the airfield, whereas Toronto is free but everything happens much further away from the audience).

I speculate that the anecdotally higher ratio of women at the smaller towns is because an air show is one a few annual "big deals" and you can't just hop on the subway and find a few hundred people doing something you'd consider more interesting than looking at planes.

Neil Postman (of blessed memory and apt last name) was on this thirty years ago. Basically making the distinction between a print and visual culture. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is right up there with Jane Jacobs on my list of books which made me think hard, if not well.

One of the interesting things about representative democracy is that we divide labour: we have a class of professional politicians who we pay to show up in parliament or sit part time on a City Council immersing themselves in public issues so we can go about our business only having to think of such things once in a while.

In a technocratic, bureaucratic, age this division of labour serves to let us lead lives of unimaginable triviality secure that most of the society's key decisions will be made competently - even if not to our particular liking. The tradeoff, of course, is that we cede a great deal of our political power to this professional political class and to the civil servants who support it. Most of the time this is no big deal; but on big issues the political class can sometimes be rather distant from its electors. Worse, it can sometimes write of the views of those electors as uninformed, unenlightened or unimaginable. this is when the electors are wise to give the political class a good sharp jerk on the choke chain and, apparently, Quebec's francophone rural overlords just administered to M. Charest.

As to privacy - so what? If I am robbing a bank I'll wear a mask. Online, I make a point of either being security slack (if CSIS really wants to know I come to GenX@40 I'm ok with that) or will go into full Cryptomonicon 128 bit encryption with proxies and all manner of other cool stuff. So far the necessity of the second has not arisen. I doubt the proliferation of surveillance cameras has made anyone the least bit safer if only because criminals are a) in general not terrifically bright, b)if bright, then bright enough not to forget to wear their mask when pulling a bank job. And I suspect that the various technologies embodied in CARNIVORE (hi CSIS ;) ) are being circumvented by any but the very dimmest terrorist or drag runner much less spy. I am increasingly inclined to believe that most non human spying and invasion of privacy is a huge waste of time and money.

At the same time this scares the hell out of me: <blockquote>A new-style "11-plus" to assess the risk every child in Britain runs of turning to crime was among a battery of proposals unveiled in Tony Blair's crime plan yesterday.

The children of prisoners, problem drug users and others at high risk of offending will also face being "actively managed" by social services and youth justice workers. New technologies are to be used to boost police detection rates while DNA samples are to be taken from any crime suspect who comes into contact with the police. guardian</blockquote>

Re: "As to privacy - so what? If I am robbing a bank I'll wear a mask. Online, I make a point of either being security slack (if CSIS really wants to know I come to GenX@40 I'm ok with that) or will go into full Cryptomonicon 128 bit encryption with proxies and all manner of other cool stuff. So far the necessity of the second has not arisen. I doubt the proliferation of surveillance cameras has made anyone the least bit safer if only because criminals are a) in general not terrifically bright, b)if bright, then bright enough not to forget to wear their mask when pulling a bank job. And I suspect that the various technologies embodied in CARNIVORE (hi CSIS ;) ) are being circumvented by any but the very dimmest terrorist or drag runner much less spy. I am increasingly inclined to believe that most non human spying and invasion of privacy is a huge waste of time and money."

I thnik I am getting a hetero-man-crush on Jay

I know a lot of people who watch CNN all the time but never read the local papers; I know of people who raised money for 9/11 victims but have never volunteered in their own community. Nobody knows about issues and the news is now info-tainment.

Re: "I know of people who raised money for 9/11 victims but have never volunteered in their own community. Nobody knows about issues and the news is now info-tainment."

When I was in college we called such bandwagon-jumpers-on "Trendinistas" but that faux term would be lost on persons who weren't of legal thinking age before the late 1980s.

Me thinks there's some misuse of inductive logic here. Are there nitwits? Sure. But are we taking that 'nobody knows the issues' a bit too far? Do I know all the issues? No way. I'm not a polymath. Few ever really could handle all the issues. Ever. Wasn't there a time that being a finely educated individual really was just knowing the right quotes from certain works?

Yeah, there's some people who live solely on CNN; and CNN, while limited, is actually pretty diverse in topics. Not super-hard core in depth, but it is exposure(my problem isn't that CNN is infotainment so much producing everything as a COnspiracy, Controversy, or Disaster. Not much room for real learning, and that goes for MOST journalistic media these days. A lot of it doesn't inform so much as seek merely to get eyeballs for the advertisement dollars on the back end.).

No, we're about as informed of things as our ancestors were(for many of whom the world simply didn't exist as anything more than an abstracion 50 miles from their residence).

They weren't all Percey Shelly, wife Mary, and Lord Byron all sitting around talking about the meaning of it all and discussing the latest news from the War for Greek Independence. They weren't all rich punks with the time, energy, or inclination to worry about such things.

So, I'd say, we're about even. There's the Few who Know. The vast middle of us who try. Then there's the nitwits who don't care but talk big or simply don't care and take great pride in not caring. Was like that going all the way back to 1066 I'd bet.