The Internet and the Republic of skepticism, part one

Taken together, the rise of the search engine coupled with the digitalization of vast amounts of information that would have previously been either difficult or impossible to access has provided us with unprecedented opportunities to debunk that which requires debunking, as well as to ensure that a given debunking is particularly accessible to those who happen to be looking into a given subject. This is just as well; the rise of such things as e-mail forwards have provided our not-so-skeptical adversaries with similarly unprecedented opportunities to perpetuate things that need to be debunked, which you've probably experienced to the extent that you're included in the address books of people in whose address books you were not really intending to be included. The question that naturally arises, then, concerns whether the particular dynamics of the Internet have had the overall effect of fueling nonsense or throttling it.

(via reddit)