Facebook and other companies are more like bacteria that infect the wound of digital illiteracy. I think it's time we start seeing that as a wound, not as an un

Facebook and other companies are more like bacteria that infect the wound of digital illiteracy. I think it's time we start seeing that as a wound, not as an unavoidable or even desirable state of things. An information age requires digital literacy, otherwise you will have a priest caste, and that will abuse its power. I see no way around it, and criticizing priests for being bad priests to me enforces the idea that there even should be a priest caste. I can't quite tell you what digital literacy is, but I know that responses along the line of "do you know how a modern microprocessor works in detail?" are silly, because many people can read and write without being historians or etymologists. And even people who can't read or write often can speak and understand a whole lot. Contrast that with some priests mumbling in Latin, with people being subject to things they aren't allowed to understand. So maybe knowing what files are, what memory is, what a program is, having their own webspace and email, stuff like that would be a great start. And the start to that is to stop pretending that's unattainable, or that "people don't want that". If they knew what it entails in the long run, most of them would want that. And people do much more complicated things than running a website. People raise children, they drive cars, they raise and train dogs, they work in the garden, they remember all sorts of stuff about sports, and so on. Most jobs require a lot of complicated edge-case knowledge, too. So knowing what an URL or a file is, and maybe some HTML, is trivial compared to that. If people could get 20% off on all T-Shirts for the rest of their life if they had their own website, most people on this planet would have a website before the end of the year. I exaggerate, but by how much I'm really not sure.