“The Internet is a gigantic version of what they faced in the 1920s, when the first widely distributed pamphlets about “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” came out. They were cheap and easily available. It was an age of increasing literacy. It prefigured what we have on a much bigger scale now. It was hard in these circumstances to distinguish the authoritative from the quack. It’s like medicine in the Wild West: There are some doctors around, but there are a lot of people on strange wagons saying they can cure your blindness.
We always had this problem to a degree, but what the Internet has done is revolutionized the amount of information. We know that Google operates on an algorithm that tells you what’s popular, but it seems to be telling you what’s authoritative.
”
David Aaronovitch talks about conspiracy theories on Salon, but touches on the internet’s role of spreading information that may not be authoritive. While the internet has increased the ease of publishing we do need to work on the literacy to understand the published items.
