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No, the average citizen's heavy dependence will just shift to "being told what to think by a viral video on YouTube". That's what we're seeing here, by the way

• mmjaa 8y ago
  What I'm seeing is "authority fatigue". Nobody really trusts their authority's views any more. And I think that's a good thing, personally. Not sure that I'd agree that Youtube is the best source of it, but yeah - its high time the Western world learned to think for itself, anyway. Maybe this is progress?
  • iamben 8y ago
    Except the western world (or a large part of) will never think for itself. They just replace one voice with another that seems more credible and removes the need to think and analyse. Thinking is hard. Getting your 'facts' from the guy with 200k subscribers (he must be legit, right?) on YouTube. That's easy. Politics, science (I mean, go look at people talking about chemtrails or flat earth), whatever. There was a paper about this that made the front page of HN a few weeks back. Was a good read if you can find it. I'm with you though. It's all a bit of a mess. Perhaps politicians have always been such self serving, blowhard scumbags - but until the internet and quick, global discussion was so ubiquitous we just didn't notice en mass.