"What you find as you explore the tweets and blog posts

of the profession's leaders is that the failure of newspapers has brought with it a cognitive failure as well, in which a handful of superstitions have come to obscure what is actually happening in the world. So powerful is our desire to believe in the benevolent divinity of technology that it cancels out our caution, forces us to dismiss doubt as so much simple-minded Luddism. We have trouble grasping that the Internet might not bring only good; that an unparalleled tool for enlightenment and research and transparency might also bring unprecedented down-dumbing; that something that empowers the individual might also wreck the structures that have protected the individual for decades.

from "Bright frenetic mills" by Thomas Frank, from the "Easy Chair" of Harper's, December 2010, pg. 13

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/12/0083200