Information Is Wealth, Knowledge Is Power

It seemed at one point that knowledge was now open to all with the internet throwing open the doors to the masses to access the best of the news sources free of charge. The power to the masses seemed less of an idealistic dream than usual. And I guess what I was saying is that the early days of the Industrial Revolution seemed somewhat reproduced in terms of the emotions we felt.
But soon, freedom was taboo. Free books are harder to get. News is harder to get. I was a big fan of the Economist online from right about when I decided I couldn’t really be bothered shelving over Rs. 500 for a hard copy. But even the Economist, free market proponent, has restricted some of its sections to paying customers. What we’re missing here is that pro-free market often means pro-capitalist and pro-profit as well.
Good intelligence like the stuff found in Stratfor is restricted to people who pay $360 annually. The rest are forced to rely on tabloid esque sources of news that paint sensationalist black and white pictures distorting everything in the world. Defining the good guys and bad guys, right and wrong, etc for people, when it is the people who need the information to decide things for themselves.
Most of the  “free” news out there can sometimes cater to the unheeding masses. Can “brainfeed” and “brainwash” render them even more ignorant than when they started off? This may seem to go against my previously expressed support for the  “new media” revolution, but not necessarily. New media is about freedom, and restriction, be it for financial or propagandist/security reasons, only serves to destroy that freedom.
People need good clean information. For example, just read up on any conflict happening in the world right now. Be it Israel-Palestine, Iran-Iraq-USA, India’s internal conflicts or Sri Lanka’s own bloody history of fighting, and the deeper you go in, the more you realize that what you thought was right and wrong usually merges into mass of grey subjective matter that can be looked at and judged at based purely on your standpoint.
Mass media doesn’t really communicate underlying reasons for conflict. It prefers to dwell on symptoms of conflict. “The impacts of conflict.” It tends to perceive the general mass of persons out there as uninterested people who simply look to the news for cheap thrills to go along with an early morning caffeine boost. And they may be right. But then again if cause makes effect and vice versa, a freer environment of true and objective information will probably be able to change public perceptions of news and how they look to it.
Achieving this can be a problem, I’m aware. Good information costs a lot to obtain, and hence people who obtain it need some incentive to go after it. But then if the information they get is only restricted to an elite few, what is the purpose of what they do? This is a problem indeed. I’ll stick by something I’ve said before, some piracy like book piracy and illegal circulation of information, is wholly good, although it may be wrong.