Michael has a great article in the Global Politician entitled Web2.0 – Erudition, Not Hoarding: Response to Sam Vaknin. With computing and electronic media, as with any medium including book, newspaper, television, radio, its value depends on the user. For the person who really doesn’t want to learn, the argument over medium is immaterial.
… Sam Vaknin comments, “the fare served up by the electronic media everywhere now consist largely of soap operas, interminable sports events, and reality TV shows.” Still, he does not give credit to this independent effort by thousands of people worldwide to bring a new kind of library to electronic doorsteps everywhere … If one cannot judge, cannot evaluate, cannot assimilate or chooses not to assimilate, then one is simply awash in a sea of words Sam has described above.
… Vaknin’s final quotation concludes here: “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.”
… These “New Dark Ages” are not fostered by the masses. They are the outcome of the abdication of the intellectuals, those who could have been great teachers and scholars, great librarians of the Third Millennium’s multi-billion book libraries … If you take neither side, then you, too, have abdicated humanity.
