Wishful Thinking: Why The Economist Wants Social Media to Replace Blogs

Anthony Wile
The Daily Bell

The Economist Magazine is out with an article entitled “The end of mass media: Coming full circle.” It actually provides us with a kind of sub-dominant social theme – that “social media” take us back to the pamphleteering days of Samuel Johnson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and others.

This has been, in a sense, a message of ours for many years. And here at DB, we’ve regularly compared the output of the Gutenberg Press and its revolutionary influence to the Internet. The Economist is about 10 years late in joining the party.

Even so, I think The Economist is making the wrong comparison and doing it on purpose. Blogs and websites are a far more appropriate comparison to the Gutenberg Press than “social media.”

There is likely a reason that The Economist, a power elite mouthpiece, wants to talk up social media. Here’s the beginning of an article from Global Research written way back in March 2009, when Facebook only had 20 million users but was well on its way to success:

Facebook – the CIA conspiracy …

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