The Fifth Power

My blog is currently not taking posts. This is frustrating, as I finally have a topic I want to flog until it or I drop into a Slough of Despond, where I find Marek, and join him in drinking Vodka with Pepper while listening to Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto #3 seventeen times a day until the crack of Doom.

The floggified topic is the potentiation of the force field that is about to light up as the macrosphere (Google) merges with the microsphere (Pyra) - Sheila Lennon of the Providence Journal picked up on this in what she wrote yesterday. Google has done more to free us from the Flatland of the Fourth Estate than perhaps it has received credit for. It has gotten bad out there - as even Paul Krugman puts it (only he doesn't dare to say that the large print publications, including the one he works for, are barely less wall-eyed):

''For months both major U.S. cable news networks have acted as if the decision to invade Iraq has already been made, and have in effect seen it as their job to prepare the American public for the coming war.'' Krugman

And, there's this:

"Media for a long time was the resource of the citizenry, known as the fourth power, the power to oppose decisions of the government that would have harmful effects on people. The fourth power no longer has this power," says Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and communications professor at the University of Paris. Now, rather than protecting the people, the "fourth power is now exploiting and oppressing them" for commercial gain, he said. "How can we tackle this when the protector of the people has transformed into its enemy?" Association for Progressive Communication

The fifth power could lie within the toolset to displace corporate broadcast coercion supplied as Google brings awareness to nano-publishing. Think about it.