Culture Fracturing from Information Filters

We can imagine that progress in human information-processing will face some usual social difficulties. Your angry “Klingon” relatives may find unexpected allies among “proboscically enhanced” (aka long-nosed) people protesting against using their alternative standard of beauty as a negative stereotype. The girl next door may be wary that your “re-clothing” filters leave her in Eve’s dress. Parents could be suspicious that their clean-looking kids appear to each other as tattooed...

 William Gibson 1996 Observations of the WWW

In the age of wooden television, media were there to entertain, to sell an advertiser's product, perhaps to inform. Watching television, then, could indeed be considered a leisure activity. In our hypermediated age, we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species of work. Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple entertainment. ...

 The Deleterious Effects of Pseudoscience

...science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or...