I think one issue that has emerged with the 'free' internet is that more people than ever are reading news, but very few people are paying for it. This statisti

I think one issue that has emerged with the 'free' internet is that more people than ever are reading news, but very few people are paying for it. This statistic is often cited by failing newspaper companies about why they are worth investing in. The issue is qualitative more than quantitative. The engagement that most people used to have with news was casual and occasional. There were a minority of cable TV news viewers but for most other people it was limited to short summary programs on network TV. The news magazines and opinion journals used to be much more cordial and high brow on both the left and the right, more focused on digesting books and important issues and less dedicated to parsing the trending issue of the picosecond. Now you have tons of casual news viewers participating in social media sharing mostly shallow 'opinions' which are just repetitions of what they have just consumed. It's kind of like what used to be the rich person seafood section with highfalutin organic varieties of wild caught fish has been replaced with 16 aisles of DISCOUNT IMITATION "CRAB" MEAT that all tastes the same and comes out of an industrial tube. When social media was new I think most tech forward people's opinion was that this was good, and that people would move on from "CRAB." Sure we have one whole aisle of synthetic flavored "CRAB," but in the future it will be better. Instead we just got 16 aisles of "CRAB" and no more good fish, just the memories of what used to be a more refined news culture. Mass participation in national issues is very distorting for the United States as it is constitutionally composed. Our laws are designed for intense local and state-level participation in politics, with representatives mediating the passions of democracy at the national level. The media optimizes for intense national/international 'engagement,' but this must lead to frustration and unhappiness because mass participation can have zero impact on national issues of import (for the most part) because of the fundamental structure of our system.