When new technologies come along there is always that sector of society who challenges them and questions their value and purpose in society. Some go as far as denouncing them as unnecessary and prefer to stick to their old methods. Years later this very technology becomes something we could not imagine life without. Think of telephone, radio, television, the world did not always have these conveniences but today one could not think of a time when these technologies were not available. It is funny how that works---one minute we vow to never use such a useless thing when we have a perfectly good alternative in place and the next minute it becomes something we desperately need or life will cease to exist. In Hamlet's Blackberry, William Powers explores some of these technologies that brought about backlash.
The book, although not an object we think of as constituting a sophisticated technology, was quite groundbreaking for its time. For the first time in the history of the world, Johann Gutenburg made the written word available to the masses using his printing press. It seems innocent enough but people feared with this availability the masses would become educated and as Italian Scholar Niccolo Perotti wrote in a 1471 letter “…now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment…And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the world.”
Perotti’s argument seems to resonate a similar argument being brought forth with the Internet and journalism today. Like the book, the Internet, on an even greater scale, allows the written word to be transcribed and available to the masses. With seemingly little regulation, anyone can create their own website or blog and claim to be providing news. Professional news organizations fear this reality because that means the public could be receiving information from a source that most likely does not vet information for accuracy and credibility as they do. As was the case with the book, the Internet is a technology that does not seem to be going away so the best thing that news organizations can do is to continue to provide well-sourced, reliable information on their websites and other platforms to demonstrate the standard that should be met and do their best to call out widely circulating falsehoods on the Internet.
