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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 functional literacy is non-existent even in developed countries, 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.
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". The mob thus empowered and complimented feels vindicated and triumphant. But history cautions us that mobs have never produced enlightenment - only concentration camps and bloodied revolutions. the Internet can and will be used against us if we don't regulate it.
Dismal results ensue:
The Wikipedia "encyclopedia" - a repository of millions of factoids, interspersed with juvenile trivia, plagiarism, bigotry, and malice - is "edited" by anonymous users with unlimited access to its contents and absent or fake credentials.
Fads like environmentalism and alternative "medicine" spread malignantly and seek to silence dissidents, sometimes by violent means;
The fare served by the electronic media everywhere now consists largely of soap operas, interminable sports events, and reality TV shows. True, niche cable channels cater to the preferences of special audiences. But, as a result of this inauspicious fragmentation, far fewer viewers are exposed to programs and features on science, literature, arts, or international affairs;
Reading is on terminal decline. People spend far more in front of screens - both television's and computer - than leafing through pages. Granted, they read online: jokes, anecdotes, puzzles, porn, and e-mail or IM chit-chat. Those who try to tackle longer bits of text, tire soon and revert to images or sounds;
With few exceptions, the "new media" are a hodgepodge of sectarian views and fabricated "news". The few credible sources of reliable information have long been drowned in a cacophony of fakes and phonies or gone out of business.
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 soundbites rather than the written word, the more they seek to escape reality and be anesthetized rather than be challenged and provoked.
Even the ever-slimming 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.
Sam Vaknin (
samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism
Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a
columnist for Central Europe Review, Global Politician, PopMatters, eBookWeb ,
and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business
Correspondent. He was the editor of mental health and Central East Europe
categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. Visit Sam's Web site at
samvak.tripod.com
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