FT256

In the pre-Internet age, our society had an order of information in which knowledge was managed by experts and authorities, as well as representatives of the political, legal, scientific, medical and economic powers-that-be. Academics, scientists, spokespersons for the state and the owners, producers and editors of the major media decided what was real and what was unreal, what was true and what was false. The upside of this was that an awful lot of utter nonsense did not find mainstream distribution. The downside was that some material was misclassified as unreal or false – either by error, or because of interest group pressure, ideology or group-think.