[scalio]

Pretty thought provoking. It ties into my view that a free internet is a major democratizing force (like the next stepping stone after printing): anyone may speak up, anyone may distribute knowledge, it spreads at near light speed. And possibly, given an initial investment, basically for free. This is very powerful, which is why I don't approve of the glorification of the developments in many governments or Silicon Valley or elsewhere. A walled internet is just as powerful as an open one, but in the wrong direction.

[Stranger43]

The problem is that when anyone can speak equally how do you tell the sage apart from the village idiot.

This is why fox news survived as fox.com along with most of the existing journalistic culture of never digging too deep into something the authorities are going to react to badly to having dug up survived the transition from airwaves to Internet. You might have some blogger somewhere knowing the truth but you also have some blogger somewhere who thinks the truth is something radical different then it is and when those are equal they are equally easy for the "press" to dismiss.

[scalio]

True, but I think this problem can only be solved sustainably through education. At some point, we may just have to accept that one has to deal with some number of idiots a day and get over it. Discovery suffers dramatically, sadly.

[Stranger43]

But at what point does the structure of how our economy work ensure that the educated becomes the majority.

I agree that as underground media network the Internet as the xerox machine before it are the first time the natural monopoly of the printing press and the broadcast tower have been truly challenged, but ultimately the real problem is culture not tech, i.e. we have to get to the point where real education becomes commonplace and don't stop just because someone leaves school to start working, and that wont happen unless were ready to eradicate the current media/education industries and replace it with something far more egalitarian.