Same Old Complaints
Everywhere we look, people complain about different aspects of the Internet: information overload, filter bubbles, fake news etc. But, none of these are new complaints, say Tom Standage and Seth Stevenson in their Secret History of Future podcast . The same complaints were heard even when (drumbeats) printing was invented! Huh? What were the concerns with printing, other than the infamous problem the Church had, over losing its power? Well, there was the concern that printing would soon lead to garbage drowning out the good stuff. Even among the good topics, how would one know which particular book to read? And how could one ever know if anything written was really true at all? Oh, and there was also the concern among some that the proliferation of books would soon mean that nobody could ever know everything, because there would be too much information out there. As you can see, some of these concerns were legitimate. And so, solutions that we now take for grant...