History in the making?

A while back, I watched an online animation about the future of the press. You can watch it here.

The basic gist is that several mergers of online giants like Google and Amazon, combined with technology that allows people to create their own news portals, basically made the concept of news a self-selecting enterprise. For example, if you wanted to select, say, only information about pro wrestling and the latest on Pamela Anderson, then that is what would show up each day as the top news. Nothing about Korea. Nothing about a national election. Nothing about crime rates in your town skyrocketing. Only pseudo-athletes and big breasts.

In this futuristic world, what we now know as the giants of the fourth estate have become bankrupt and obsolete. Nobody reads the New York Times or listens to APRN. They simply get their “news” spoon-fed to them via the billions of self-proclaimed “journalists” across the Web. There is not even a baseline assurance that the things that you read are true or well-researched or created with any eye toward basic journalistic ethics. Everyone creates the news. The line between the journalist and the wingnut down the street is gone. The concept of balanced reporting is gone. If you want to hear only that all gay people are evil perverts, then you can set your channels to feed you gobs and gobs of diatribes to reinforce your bigotry on a daily basis.

I can’t help but wonder how close we are getting to this place. And I should state up front that I am a journalist by training and may be a bit snobbish about the journalist’s role in society. Still, the bottom line to this scenario, and to a certain degree this holds true even today, is that people seem to be growing less and less informed. And the scary thing is that they seem to be choosing to become that way. It’s ironic that in this age of so much information, people seem to have less information about things that are important. Perhaps it’s a consequence of information overload.

At any rate, I wonder if this scenario has ever played out in modern human history. What happens to a society that chooses to be ignorant of the things that allow it to govern itself wisely? Certainly we have plenty of examples of authoritarian regimes that block out their citizens’ access to information, but has there ever been a country where the people actually chose to simply look away, where people, even though they could learn about the important things in their society, simply say, “You know, I don’t really feel like it.”

Are we choosing the path to our own destruction?

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