The Internet has never been as large and diverse as it is now. In the 2000s Wikipedia was often the only place where you could find generally useful information about the world on the Internet, now everything in it plus many other things can be found on many other websites competing for algorithmic attention.
The real thing about today’s Internet is that on it, censorship happens not by having too little information, but too much, much of which will never be shown to very many people because of the algorithms of search engines or social media recommendation systems. I don’t do a lot of “social media” and always find it weird to hear about personalities there who apparently have thousands or millions of followers but whom I have never heard of before.
The Internet has never been as large and diverse as it is now. In the 2000s Wikipedia was often the only place where you could find generally useful information about the world on the Internet, now everything in it plus many other things can be found on many other websites competing for algorithmic attention.
The real thing about today’s Internet is that on it, censorship happens not by having too little information, but too much, much of which will never be shown to very many people because of the algorithms of search engines or social media recommendation systems. I don’t do a lot of “social media” and always find it weird to hear about personalities there who apparently have thousands or millions of followers but whom I have never heard of before.
I don’t agree that Wikipedia used to be the only place. There were plenty of competing encyclopedias, it was simply the best long-term.
britannica has entered the chat