Those Rascals on the Internets

Many people in academia and the old media have tried to dismiss the internet as stupid and unfettered, since they see it as threatening to the monopoly of their line of work. One such example is a Professor who proudly proclaims that information readily available to the masses via Wikipedia constitutes a threat (H/T to LT Nixon's Mom):

The site's "free culture'' of information also lacks professional editors to exercise hierarchical and content judgment, he said. "Free culture is in my view dangerous,'' Keen said. "... It undermines the value of academic labor and ... it's something that ultimately will make academics unemployable.''

Dismissing technology that allows easy access to knowledge seems foolhardy and contrary to the goal of eliminating worldwide ignorance. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, and the reason for the availability of information is because what "they" have been feeding us is so uninteresting and ridiculous. The story of sex hormones in the tap water supply is one such example. I mean really, who gives a flying fuck, unless you're some dumb, hypochondriac housewife in Orange County? And those people are probably already shelling out cash for bottled water anyways.

Communist plot to put sex hormones in our tap water supply