The Digital Lumberjack - When life goes digital

The foremost of all the forces that drive the world is falsehood. More than any before it, twentieth-century civilization has depended on information, teaching, science, culture - in short, on knowledge as well as on a system of government which, by its very definition, seeks to make knowledge availabe to all: democracy. [snip]Those who act have better data on which to base their actions, and those on the receiving end are much better informed about what those who act are doing.
 
It is therefore interesting to inquire whether this preponderance of available knowledge - with its detail, its abundance, its ever broader and swifter disseminiation - has enabled humanity to guide itself more judiciously than in the past. The question is all the more inportant since the perfecting and accelerating of the techniques of transmission and the steady increase in the number of individuals who benefit from them will make the twenty-first century an age in which, even more than in the twentieth, information will be a central element of civilization.