Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

I'm not convinced that Obama can distinguish between "stupid ideas" and "ideas which are contrary to the Obama agenda" though. Of course he's hardly unique among politicians for this, but I do think he's less likely than, say, President Bush, to acknowledge the existence of informed and principled opposition to his policies.

It's interesting that the internet has allowed the political right to get organised in a way that it never really has before. The left-wing political protests of the 1960s had universities as their organizational focus, whereas the right never really had any similar way of getting a protest movement off the ground until the internet.

There's only a few quotes from the actual speech given but bits like this:

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter"

sound a little to me like a man bitter that the internet is being used to spread arguments disagreeing with his own.

Despite my political opposition to Obama, I thought that he understood the culture of the "IPod, XBox era." In fact, he leveraged these tools of 'diversion' in his campaign (and did so very effectively).

This seems to be the knee-jerk technophobic speech that politicians would have given in the latter half of the 20th Century. Instead of being afraid and resistant to technology (which, as we have seen, is unstoppable anyway), politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological advances to good use. See: David Cameron's TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ELnyoso6vI).

He highlights a significant point in his speech, as tel says. Being able to deal with all of the information is something that we need to cope with. However, placing the blame on the tools is not the way to go.