by Abe Sullivan

Created on: October 13, 2009   Last Updated: October 16, 2009

The creation of the printing press in Germany posed similar concerns for the Church. Now that access to books was no longer the sole domain of monks who served as scribes and clergy who held a monopoly over the interpretation of information. Now that virtually anyone had access to literature, a societal revolution was underway.

The internet, although it has been bombarded by a plethora of audio, video, senseless and pornographic images, is still dominated by text. Hyper text markup language (html) will keep this medium alive for years to come. Control over the internet isn't the goal of tyrants who wish to shut us out of information access. For those who wish to suppress information, granting internet access to the masses would be the best way of accomplishing this goal.

Every second 28,258 American users use the internet to access pornographic material. This is one of the many mass distractions that allow meaningful information to circulate on the internet unnoticed. Furthermore, sensitive information is tightly locked up into the invisible web or subscription databases which the average American is not savvy, patient, or wealthy enough to access.

In the late nineties as more and more Americans began to become internet savvy, access was monopolized through commercial online providers like AOL and CompuServe. AOL set the pace with pre-programmed favorites on their browser as well as prefabricated tabs and channels. By the time the average North American user became savvy enough to cut out the ISP middle man, their commercial entertainment driven surfing habits were established.

Dot com's flooded the World Wide Web overtaking dot orgs, dot nets, dot gov's, and dot edu's. Search engines, who subsidized their services through dot com revenue, began to herd their internet users unto the dot com sites. Around the time internet users began to learn html and compose their own websites, academics and professionals began a campaign of questioning the authority of any information found on the internet.

This questioning subsided largely due to the effort of librarians who provided the public free access to authoritative online journals, and research databases, and taught the general public how to distinguish the authoritative from the popular. Some may argue that composition of web pages has been dumbed down with the advent of peer to peer networks.

Now users can create tributes to their favorite rock star or jot down pointless developments in their blog, without crowding

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