This essay explains how the disruption of any new medium of communication causes alarms, going back to the invention of the printing press.

What causes the alarms? What we will call the lower levels of use appear first and in large amounts while important, new forms take longer.

“What the 16th-century foes of print didn’t imagine—couldn’t imagine—was what followed: We built new norms around newly abundant and contemporary literature. Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society.

“To take a famous example, the essential insight of the scientific revolution was peer review, the idea that science was a collaborative effort that included the feedback and participation of others. Peer review was a cultural institution that took the printing press for granted as a means of distributing research quickly and widely, but added the kind of cultural constraints that made it valuable.”

This writer believes however dumb many YouTube videos are, the Internet is going to make us smarter in unprecedented ways.

If you have been wondering how dumb we can get, this will cheer you enormously.

If you have not been worried about that, this still is excellent reading.

The Wall Street Journal

…”The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we’ll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet’s abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.”

Source: Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2010