Strike Out: Reading Unedited Text

The advent of global data networks has largely removed the editorial filtering which both restricted access to large audiences but also vetted the quality of text exposed to a broad audience. Here is a technique I've found effective when reading unedited text, whether in newsgroups, discussion boards, or Web log comments, which reduces the time wasted chewing through incoherent text and the depressing devaluation of the cognitive skills of one's contemporaries which results from an overdose of contributions to open fora. A modest technological fix, the “Banish Button”, is proposed to raise the intellectual level of the text readers encounter in unedited venues.