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1. Thoughts on the Internet's Founding Myths

2. Whenever I put forth on the Internet's numerous
newsgroups, discussion fora and Websites a
controversial view, an iconoclastic opinion, or a much-disputed
thesis, the winning argument against my
propositions starts with "everyone knows that ...". For a
self-styled nonconformist medium, the Internet is the
reification of herd mentality.

3. Actually, it is founded on the rather explicit belief in the
implicit wisdom of the masses. This particularly
pernicious strong version of egalitarianism postulates
that veracity, accuracy, and truth are emergent
phenomena, the inevitable and, therefore, guaranteed
outcome of multiple interactions between users.

4. But the population of Internet users is not comprised of
representative samples of experts in every discipline.
Quite the contrary. The barriers to entry are so low that
the Internet attracts those less gifted intellectually. It is a
filter that lets in the stupid, the mentally ill, the
charlatan and scammer, the very young, the bored, and
the unqualified. It is far easier to publish a blog, for
instance, than to write for the New York Times. Putting
up a Website with all manner of spurious claims for
knowledge or experience is easy compared to the peer
review process that vets and culls scientific papers.

5. One can ever "contribute" to an online "encyclopedia",
the Wikipedia, without the slightest acquaintance the
topic one is "editing". Consequently, the other day, I
discovered, to my utter shock, that Eichmann changed
his name, posthumously, to Otto. It used to be Karl
Adolf, at least until he was executed in 1962.

6. Granted, there are on the Internet isolated islands of
academic merit, intellectually challenging and
invigorating discourse, and true erudition or even
scholarship. But they are mere islets in the tsunami of
falsities, fatuity, and inanities that constitutes the bulk
of User Generated Content (UGC).

7. Which leads me to the second myth: that access is
progress.

8. Oceans of information are today at the fingertips of one
and sundry. This is undisputed. The Internet is a vast
storehouse of texts, images, audio recordings, and
databases. But what matters is whether people make
good use of this serendipitous cornucopia. A savage who
finds himself amidst the collections of the Library of
Congress is unlikely to benefit much.

9. Alas, most people today are cultural savages, Internet
users the more so. They are lost among the dazzling
riches that surround them. Rather than admit to their
inferiority and accept their need to learn and improve,
they claim "equal status". It is a form of rampant
pathological narcissism, a defense mechanism that is
aimed to fend off the injury of admitting to one's
inadequacies and limitations.

10. Internet users have developed an ethos of anti-elitism.
There are no experts, only opinions, There are no hard
data, only poll results. Everyone is equally suited to
contribute to any subject. Learning and scholarship are
frowned on or even actively discouraged. The public's
taste has completely substituted for good taste.
Yardsticks, classics, science - have all been discarded.

11. Study after study have demonstrated clearly the decline
of functional literacy (the ability to read and understand
labels, simple instructions, and very basic texts) even as
literacy (in other words, repeated exposure to the
alphabet) has increased dramatically all over the world.

12. In other words: most people know how to read but
precious few understand what they are reading. Yet,
even the most illiterate, bolstered by the Internet's mob-rule,
insist that their interpretation of the texts they do
not comprehend is as potent and valid as anyone else's.

13. When I was growing up in a slum in Israel, I devoutly
believed that knowledge and education will set me free
and catapult me from my miserable circumstances into a
glamorous world of happy learning. But now, as an
adult, I find myself in an alien universe where "culture"
means merely sports and music, where science is
decried as evil and feared by increasingly hostile and
aggressive masses, and where irrationality in all its
forms (religiosity, the occult, conspiracy theories)
flourishes.

14. The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the
retreat, back into the ivory towers of a century ago.
Increasingly, their place is taken by self-taught
"experts", narcissistic bloggers, wannabe "authors" and
"auteurs", and partisan promoters of (often self-beneficial)
"causes".

15. Dismal results ensue: fads like environmentalism and
alternative "medicine" spread malignantly and seek to
silence dissidents, sometimes by violent means; the fare
served by the media now consists exclusively of soap
operas and reality TV shows; Reading is on terminal
decline; with few exceptions, the "new media" are a
hodgepodge of sectarian view and fabricated "news";
the few credible sources of reliable information have
long been drowned in a cacophony of fakes and phonies.

16. It is a sad mockery of the idea of progress. The more
texts we make available online, the more research is
published, the more books are written - the less
educated people are, the more they rely on visuals and
sounds rather than the written word, the more they
seek to escape reality and be anesthetized rather than
be challenged and provoked.

17. Even the ever-sliming minority who do wish to be
enlightened are inundated by a suffocating and
unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data,
comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no
way to tell the two apart, so a "democracy of
knowledge" reins where everyone is equally qualified
and everything goes and is equally merited. This
relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to
become the beginning of a new "Dark Age", hopefully a
mere interregnum between two periods of genuine
enlightenment.

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