Imre von Soos· 09/02/10 · 11:43 AM

It is generally ignored that the computer and the internet are passive objects and not active, originating subjects. They provide new possibilities for and within the realm of choice of those who understand them. The decision is up to each individual person for what he does with it, reflecting his own value with his act and not that of those tools.

The making efficient use of available techniques depends on an intelligent mind. Each one moulds his tools in his own image, puts his own meaning into it, as he does with all he thinks, reads, says or writes. An intelligent mind can optimize technology for himself: technology can never optimize mentality. For the man, who is the master of his own mind and uses the various technologies as his extensions, those technologies will always stay under his mind and will; for him, who has surrendered his mind to mass-thinking and mass-behaviour, or whose intellectual capacity is not up to the level of the technology he intends to use, this technology will become a master, because he has surrendered his mind also to what it represents.

The one, who uses his computer and the internet for playing aggressive games or watching pornography, is not "digitally alphabetised"; he does not use it for educational, scientific, philosophical and cultural reasons or contacts. Searches – e.g. – done in August 2004 were 5.172.889 on pornography; 3.442.183 on sex; and 115.397 on abortion; as against 2.395 on morals; 427 on overpopulation, and 34 on the cause of overpopulation; an éclatant example of the interest of the common people. Thus "digital divide" refers to the division between the intellectually, morally and culturally developed individuals and their polar opposite mass-people, regardless in which geographical abstraction they happen to find themselves.

The internet might interconnect peers, but it could not represent the "collective mind" or "collective consciousness" (whatever these might mean) of a species, the intellectual spectrum of which is spanning between IQ50 and IQ220 (sharing that between IQ50 and IQ90 also with the apes and monkeys) and that exhibits enmity on all individual-, group-, social-, religious- and national forums. To accept the internet as the product of "collective consciousness" means to accept its content as the "collective truth", rendering it the most powerful – and subversive – medium for further political, social, philosophical, religious, commercial and even scientific brainwashing.

It is far from me to denigrate the value of the computer – which I have used since its punch-card age – or that of the internet – through which I inform myself daily about the latest scientific, philosophical and political updates and thoughts. But I – as an independent individual – am the one who draws rational conclusions from them for myself; an attitude I have always advocated.

Rational thinkers with new thoughts are there on all fields of science and philosophy, Mr. Schirrmacher, they just don't have to be filtered out and insidiously ostracised by self-righteous, well-organised groups, just because they do not swim with the current and are "not commercial".

Not what one knows, or can find out, is what matters, but what one understands and what one is able to create. The one who does not stand up with his name to what he is saying or writing, is not worth to communicate with.

Imre von Soos