Social Media Endangers Knowledge
Fundamentally though, the article fails to engage with whether these phenomenon are really a problem.<p>As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall.<p>Additionally, with the increase of the &quot;great unwashed&quot; online for lack of a better term, yes, the density of intellectual and worthwhile thought online goes down. But does that matter, or more accurately, is that cause for concern over and above the general phenomenon of an &quot;appearance&quot; focused culture?  Does social media cause, or merely reflect the values of our underlying culture?<p>What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most access to knowledge of any human civilization ever.  I can download Wikipedia.  I have e readers.  I don&#x27;t even need to pay the university any more because I have so much access to libraries, knowledge and communication and computation.<p>While I am of course concerned about our societies values and their consequences, it is hard for me to take seriously the concern on the face of it that social media is destroying knowledge, when it is available in amount, redundancy and accessibility in greater amounts than it ever has been before.  Period.<p>Perhaps there is also some anxiety on the separation of knowledge from the &quot;appearance of knowledge&quot; industry as well :p