Internet: A tool for empowerment, or tyranny?

Via Facebook and blogging friend Leo, I got to read this great essay, which a couple other Internet and blogging friends, who seem to me to tout too avidly only the plus side of the Internet, especially but not only in new media, also need to read.

A couple of its ideas conform ones I have, such as today's Chinese treating the Internet and its control just like 10th-century European autocrats did with books and newspapers -- allow enough to be published to let you know who to spy on, and over what issues.

And, it's not just problems in undemocratic countries. No, the Net exacerbates issues here at home:

Proof of the web's failure to inaugurate a new age, in which the alleged "wisdom of crowds" corrected the evasions of propagandists, comes from the US, where new technology has augmented rather than diminished the paranoid strain in American politics.

Not enough for you? New media guru Clay Shirky owns up to the flip side:

Shirky accepts that alongside the dissemination of knowledge and the building of new social and intellectual networks, the internet is producing masses of third-rate material.

He notes that Shirky then says:

We should not be surprised, he says, because history is repeating itself and vast amounts of rubbish followed Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the 1440s. But, he continues, we should not despair either because the Gutenberg revolution eventually allowed "the public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment and even literate women".

In light of my earlier comment about European autocrats, Cohen then soundly refutes Shirky:

The invention of printing certainly disseminated knowledge as well as nonsense, but his idea that print also produced political progress is absurd. The most striking political feature of Europe in the three centuries after Gutenberg was not the liberation of the newly-literate public but the rise of absolute monarchs, who wiped out medieval parliaments.

Yes, the Internet is "revolutionary." So was the printing press, and, at the same time he was getting his German bible published, Martin Luther was also, in print, calling on German rulers to kill "murdering, thieving hordes" of peasants.