Today I have been confounded by what I perceive to be the problem of our information age, that we have lost the structures with which to mediate information. This is both a fantastic sociological phenomenon, enabling me to publish this without authority from capital, church, or crown; and a dizzying roadblock to the progress of humanity. This sounds an alarmist claim, but I'll use the charge of alarmism to demonstrate this argument. Anthropogenic climate change is a phenomenon that has been repeatedly, and with increasing frequency and certainty, demonstrated broadly in the scientific community. Yet, over the same period that the science was becoming more certain, popular consensus was waning. How could this happen? That more and more data were being compiled, that more and more associations were being made, and that the picture was becoming more and more damning, yet the public weren’t buying it. Put simply, science lost its authority. In a sea of information of no discernible order, the cuckoos coexist with the commended, and the rabid reside ever so close to the regarded. The new Laws of the Sea, this information ocean of ours, are grotesquely populist. Whoever shouts the loudest sets the "trend." How do we, within this system, designate really important information? Or really truthful information for that matter? The answer is that as we haven’t yet developed these conventions. In a way it makes this a truly exciting era, an unregulated age, the wild wild web.
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