"Its just a tool boys"

Jeff Jarvis arranged these words to make an observation about the political uses of the internet. Er schrieb,

"This is still stupidly generalizing. IT'S JUST A TOOL, BOYS. Tools have no ideology or loyalty. Whether pamphleteering or phone canvassing or direct mail or the Internet or weblogs, they're just tools that are used wisely or not. Dean learned quickly and used them wisely. That says a lot about Dean -- and his people -- and little about the tools, you tools."

Yes and no. Potentially it has no ideology, but internet use is not even distributed. Recall the famous telephone survey of 1948 that predicted Dewey to win the White House. Opps, people who owned phones were significantly more likely to be Republican that it threw off the polling results. When technology is not evenly distributed (and it rarely is) its not just a tool, it has implications about its owners, even when only a small group is excluded (because sometimes that small group becomes significant). This doesn't justify some of the broad sweeping generalizations one sees about who blogs, or uses the internet, but the internet is not "just a tool" devoid of any information about its users. Even television, though nearly ubiquitous, is not watched the same amount or the same way by everyone.