Arianna Huffington

Those issues aside, The Huffington Post itself gushed:

The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age – leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement.

In a word, what we are seeing is the birth of a sort of information trust.

Obviously, the Huffington Post Media Group is not the only such body. But increasingly these trusts may well dominate the Internet, and their offerings will be shaded by the owners’ ideology. We know about Mrs. Huffington’s ideology. But what about Google? The story of its four-year collaboration on censorship with the Chinese government is not edifying (though they pulled out eventually). What about Facebook and the other social networks? As information on the Web multiplies and sorting through it becomes ever more complex, the views of the few at the top of such enterprises grow in importance. Imagine a weird sort of merger involving, among others, AOL/Huff, Facebook, and Google.

The Internet has some inherent advantages. Regardless of how obscure one’s interests, one can communicate instantly with like-minded folk across the planet. Whole libraries of books are now available for perusal from home. Television, movies, and music can be had at any time of day or night. Furthermore, a wealth of translation devices allows one the treasures of non-English-language thought.

But there are also drawbacks. The wealth of information can give one width without depth of knowledge—the idea that one can look anything up may prevent one from actually learning about something for its own sake. It is far easier to extract factoids from old books online than to sit down and read them, absorbing the author’s stance and rationale. Easier still is to simply take Wikipedia’s predigested facts as the last word without doing further research on one’s own. (Wikipedia is a wonderful jumping-off point for research, but going no further is like staying at the station rather than getting on the train.) Imagine how dangerous to our intellectual life the inherent inducements to laziness would be if married to ideological poison.

What can be done? If an ideologically slanted “information trust” is indeed developing, how best to combat it? Invoke government aid in a new anti-trust crusade? Apart from the fact that we do not have men the caliber of William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt around today, such a venture may not even be possible given the level of technology involved. Even if it were possible, handing that kind of power to the government might be a medicine worse than the cure.

So how to minimize the nascent control of people such as Arianna Huffington over what is fast becoming the dominant feature in many lives? At the risk of sounding like a liberal, the answer is education—indeed, liberal education. Married to the basic skills necessary to use the Net, a good grounding in the Western canon will allow one to extract the maximum benefit from the enormous amount of knowledge out there. Such a person will have the ability to look up anything required, and so to use the Net as a real resource of, rather than a substitute for, knowledge. Add to this the ability to interact with like-minded individuals. Let enough right-minded folk do that, and perhaps one day we will find that knowledge really is power.