Ten years ago, could you have read the Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Jordan Times and Asahi Shimbun (without going to the newsstand, praying all the papers were there and paying for each one) and then signed into your blog and posted your thoughts about world events? With a click of the send button your observations are available to people in Chicago, New York, Paris, Amman and Tokyo. Congratulations, you have a potential news-reading audience that William Randolph Hurst would have envied. The best part is Google (along with many others) does it all for free.
Now you do not need an education, or an editor, to become a publisher. Please do not take this in a negative or degrading way. I am, after all, a part of this phenomenon. I do not need a newspaper or book publisher to get my ideas out to the public now. This revolutionary tool places voluminous libraries of information at my beck and call, and gifts me with an infinite amount of print space through which I may express myself. The Internet is a marvelous contribution to humanity’s quest to understand and relate to one another.
The sheer power of this newborn entity also begs a question, though. When this juggernaut of opinion is aimed at someone, what sort of effect will it have? Will it turn a good person into a saint? Not likely, since no news sells like bad news.
The masses thrive on gossip and innuendo, the peccadilloes of the famous and powerful. So, it seems to me, the Internet, being an expression of the multitudes, would blossom with megabyte after megabyte of negative attention directed towards the most visible in our world’s society.
I am not writing this because I am jaded with humanity. Put a jeweler’s loupe to a diamond and imperfections will magically appear. It stands to reason that staring at someone all the time, incessantly recording his or her movements, will, sooner or later, yield faults. If you start out looking for something to dislike, well, the process gets a whole lot easier. This whole procedure is greatly accelerated if the observers do not personally know their subject. It becomes strangely painless to say and write terrible things about other human beings.
