Googling Is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen
Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.
.. Plato argued in “The Republic” that the fact that democracies couldn’t control that flow and point it toward truth was one reason they often dissolved into tyranny. In a different vein, Noam Chomsky argued in the 1980s that consent was being “manufactured” by Big Media — large consolidated content-delivery companies (like this newspaper) that could cause opinions to sway one way or the other at their whim.
.. searching the Internet can get you to information that would back up almost any claim of fact, no matter how unfounded. It is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.
.. Search for “what really happened to the dinosaurs” and one of the top results is likely to be from a site called answersingenesis.org — not, I suggest, a good source of information on the T-Rex.
.. We no longer disagree just over values. Nor do we disagree just over the facts. We disagree over whose source — whose fountain of facts — is the right one.