I hear a lot of sound bites from the miners when I go to hearings. Most of the are easy to counter and, after a few tries, the miners seem to give up and move on to the next thing they think will divide the community and make it easier to ram their projects down our throats.
But I’ve been puzzling over a snappy comeback to a phrase that crept into the sound bite hit parade about a month ago. It goes something like “I’m tired of hearing from Google-educated people about this.” The implication is, of course, that learning via the Internet is somehow inferior to learning some other way.
Yesterday, we reelected Barack Obama for a second term as President. Pick your side, I don’t care. The main point I want to make is that some of us knew which way to bet on that election long before the results were in — because we’re Internet-educated.
If you listened to talk radio and let pundits form your views, or read textbooks and built your prediction on the rules of thumb that political scientists have built for you, your prediction about the election was probably wrong. But I, an Internet-educated type guy, went to bed two hours before the networks called the election. And as my head hit the pillow, I was pretty confident that I knew what was going to happen. Sure enough, the result on Wednesday morning was spang on what I thought it would be.
So I still don’t have a cool one-liner to counteract the miners’ sound bite. But I’m happy to call myself Internet educated and I hope you are too. In the not too distant future, I bet we all will be Internet educated. Maybe that will help us get to better solutions to these puzzlers we’re working on.