{"id":7101,"date":"2004-10-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-04T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/2004\/10\/05\/douglas-adams\/"},"modified":"2007-10-25T14:15:35","modified_gmt":"2007-10-25T04:15:35","slug":"douglas-adams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/2004\/10\/05\/douglas-adams\/","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Adams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Stumbled across <a href=\"http:\/\/www.douglasadams.com\/dna\/19990901-00-a.html\">this<\/a> great piece by Douglas Adams (by way of <a href=\"http:\/\/sourcefrog.net\/weblog\/software\/wikipedia\/gannets.html\">Martin Pool&#8217;s<\/a> blog), titled &#8220;How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Not only did he write some of the stupidist, funniest books ever, he was also a smart guy. The point that grabbed me most:<\/p>\n<p><!--\n\n\n<blockquote>Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants.  Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back - like newspapers, television or granite. ...  What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust - of course you can't, it's just people talking - but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV - a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.\n--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What should concern us is not that we can&#8217;t take what we read on the internet on trust &#8211; of course you can&#8217;t, it&#8217;s just people talking &#8211; but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV &#8211; a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stumbled across this great piece by Douglas Adams (by way of Martin Pool&#8217;s blog), titled &#8220;How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet&#8221;. Not only did he write some of the stupidist, funniest books ever, he was also a smart guy. The point that grabbed me most: What should concern us is not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[16,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}