Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

The medium is the message

I just stumbled on a livejournal community called amipregnant. In one way it is a very good thing - young women, who possibly through no fault of their own are quite ignorant of their own biology, can post and read here to find out information that has been denied to them.

In another way it is quite sad. How can these girls have got to the age where they are fertile and sexually active without having been educated enough to know what gets you pregnant, and what the signs of pregnancy are?

Other questions are quite technical and I think highly appropriate for a self-help livejournal site, for example:

I take Zithromax, a form of Azithromycin which is used to treat a wide variety of infections, in this case laringitis and bronchitis in an athsmatic... they say nothing of Z-pack (zithromax) affecting the birth control pill, but on the zpack website, they include half a sentence saying it may decrease the effectivness of some pills... etc.

What could be more sensible than a question of this kind, asking for support on a difficult technical issue?

In all this type of knowledge sharing is a very positive aspect of the Internet, bringing enlightenment to communities that are shrouded in ignorance. However the level of ignorance shown by a minority of the posters saddens me. In particular (this may sound odd) because the spelling and grammar seem to indicate that these are not unintelligent girls.
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