We saw this coming...

In the early to mid 90s I was introduced to the Internet.  To be clear, we had been talking about something very similar before this, but those were all private networks like Compuserve or AOL and I myself was a daily user of a bulletin board service (BBS) hosted by the American Embassy in Tokyo.  As an editor/reporter for a monthly high technology and telecommunications newspaper in Tokyo I was up to my eyeballs in stories about ISDN and B-ISDN with fiber to the curb, fiber to the home and Iridium, Inmarsat, and later Teledesic.  I was also following American politics closely since that's just what I do, so I was hearing a lot about the "Information Superhighway" from keynote speeches given by Vice President Al Gore.  I went to a lot of conferences where smart people talked for long stretches about how the information age was going to transform the way our society worked and played.  Not everybody saw this as a good thing.

If the 40 years from the 50s to the 90s were the age of Broadcasting many people began saying that the new era would be one of "narrow casting".  Some of the thought leaders at the dawn of the age of the World Wide Web saw that the future of news and entertainment would be vastly more customizable.  In fact, with Usenet it was already happening where people were only subscribing to news feeds that focused only on the things the subscriber was interested in.  At the same time the ability for anybody to publish anything they wanted to was only limited by their knowledge of how to build a web page (HTML), finding someone to host their "home page" and their time.  Then all they needed was the ability to drive page views to their content.  (In those days there wasn't a lot of competition)

The danger that a few people were talking about was that with all this narrowcasting going on, people's choices in news and information sources would tend to reinforce their own view of the world and insulate them from dissenting opinions.  This would drive them further to which ever direction they tended to live on the "left - right" political spectrum.  This might not be a terrible thing if there wasn't also the problem that nobody is fact checking the things we are being told.  As Abraham Lincoln once said, "You can't always believe the things you read on the Internet."

So now we have one candidate on the right who can say just about anything and his partisans will believe him and another candidate on the left who is considered untrustworthy because of 20 plus years of lies being spread about her by a "vast right wing conspiracy."  The echo chambers on both sides (which I do not exclude myself as being part of) preach to our choirs.  And democracy suffers as a result.   But at least we can say, we saw it coming.