[Sean]

What a great opening sentence in the article you posted.

"Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less."

My worry is that we're not mature enough as a global society to responsibly handle the ease with which we can receive and pass on information. Yeah, the internet allows for the intelligent and immediate exchange of ideas, but honestly, it also gives really stupid people an equal sized soap box to scream their idiocy from. I mean, I don't believe that the majority of Republicans are "birthers" by a long shot, and I don't think that anywhere near the majority of them are racists, either. And I don't think that the majority of Democrats were "truthers", or PETA freaks who equate chicken farms with Nazi concentration camps. But damn if those aren't the ones that tend to grab more headlines than anyone else from their respective parties.

Right now, it seems that everyone's just seeing how deep they can dig their heels in for their team, regardless of the quality of the debate, or the accuracy/honesty of their assertions. And unfortunately, there are tons of other stupid people out there who are just gobbling it all up without even a half-hearted attempt to find anything resembling an objective fact. Hell, it's hard to figure out the objective facts even when you are actively searching for them, so it's incredibly unnerving to imagine the folks who are actively avoiding them.

But for me, the cherry on top of it all is that a very notable part of the dumb-dialogue of today seems to be unabashed hatred and mockery of "intellectualism". At a time in human history when intelligence is more crucial to our collective survival than ever, we really can't afford to be setting our sights on achieving willful ignorance.

So I feel like global society is at a tipping point, where if we tip one way we race headlong into the downfall of the human race, tip the other and we'll actually survive to evolve into a far more advanced and stable future. I honestly feel like it's a 50/50 crap-shoot at this point.