That’s a good thing, right? Isn’t that what we’ve been fighting for all along? Isn’t that what Norman Rockwell meant when he painted Freedom of Speech—the guy standing up to speak, with some folded-up paper in his pocket? That’s what free speech is all about, isn’t it? “Every man has a voice to be heard.”
Yeah, I thought that was the whole point, too. Now I’m not so sure. I remember when the Internet was first coming into mass awareness, and I read an article commenting on it as a forum for every thought every person ever had. The article said this would be the first time such a bulk of information would flood our attention, almost all of it unedited and unvetted.
The author who wrote this article believed this would be a huge problem: that before then, information was sorted through, vetted, and deemed “worthy of human consumption” before it was made available to the throngs of humans grabbing for it.
This is good and bad, of course. The “good” is that before something was published, many eyes went over it, it was carefully determined to be accurate, and it was rejected if found to be preposterous, sensationalist, or downright a lie. (I am speaking here more of news items and non-fiction work.) Of course, if something was labelled “fiction,” the scrutiny was a bit less extreme. But it was still important to identify it as such (recall the famous Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast).
