In about an hour, I'm heading up to Maine for a meeting of the Pew Fellows Program on Marine Conservation, where I'll be speaking on a Sunday panel entitled “Media’s Shifting Baselines: Science in the New Information Ecology.” Prepping for it got me thinking about how to develop a thought that is already present as a kind of kernel in Unscientific America--namely, how this "new information ecology," created by the Internet, makes us all much more susceptible than before to misinformation, and, paradoxically, probably encourages anti-science and anti-rational tendencies to grow. Contrary to the general tenor of optimism about the web, my growing feeling is the availability of more information than ever before, right at our fingertips, is no panacea for those who care about science and reason--in fact, it's quite the opposite. Stories like this one, this one, and this one--combined with the way the web has allowed anti-vaccine and anti-global warming advocates to thrive as never before--strike me as merely the tip of the iceberg. Just having lots of good information available online doesn't protect us from lurching towards all manner of bad information that is also available; rather, for all the good stuff that can be put out there, there are just as many people empowered as never before to cluster around the really bad stuff. And that is precisely what we're seeing. What do people think--is my admittedly tentative thesis off base, or am I onto something?
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