Tina Brown, pro and con

Dan Rottenberg’s feint at praising Tina Brown (Editor’s Notebook) is more salt than food. The median IQ of the Internet makes ranters like Rush Limbaugh look thoughtful. Nicholas Carr and Shirley Terkle constitute an emerging vanguard of commentators judging internet “thinking” as infra compos mentis. Leo Lowenthal long ago indicted the celebrification of American media, a sort of secular canonization that encourages Americans to worship at the altar of the trivial and flashy.

Editor’s comment: The concerns expressed today about the Internet are largely identical to those expressed 500 years ago when Gutenberg invented movable type— i.e., that it would stir up the masses and lead to an outpouring of pornography. Which it did. But didn’t the benefits outweigh the liabilities?