See! Charlie Brooker Agrees with me!

Over at the Guardian today, Charlie Brooker discusses the inherent problems with allowing the heaving masses to have access to the media tools needed for them to sow the seeds of their ignorance into the ripe soil of other, equally uneducated, minds. Naturally, he has received a stern rebuke from the publication's foolish readership. However, their rabid mouth-frothing has only proved his point further, as can further be seen by the desperate attempts made by the heretics to extract themselves from the hypocritical position of defending bigots under the banner of liberalism.

Though correct, Mr Brooker, is evidently too connected to the modern world to see the true extent of the problem. The vortex of stupidity that is the BBC's 'Have Your Say' section is but the mere tip of the Iceberg. The real problem here is, of course, the invention of paper and the printing press. In man's golden age, literacy was a commodity. You were privileged if you were able to read, and even more privileged if you were able to write. Thus, though conventional wisdom would have you believe that mass literacy is a good thing, realistically it's a catastrophe. The old system was self-policing. After all, the scarcity of both training and parchment meant that only intelligent minds would have access to the materials needed to write original works, and the laboriousness of the copying process meant that only brilliant minds would have their works recreated in sufficient numbers to ensure any long-term survival. The removal of these safeguards dooms us to slowly drown in a colossal pool of our own verbal excrement. Medieval man knew the opinions of St Thomas and St Augustine were worth more than those of a simple rustic and because we have ignored their sage advice not only are we are eternally doomed to listening to the opinions of 'Dave' from 'Dagenham' but also to knowing that, far from Roger Bacon or Chaucer, the legacy we will leave to future generations is a million unsold copies of 'The Amber Spy Glass', the 'Halo' novelizations and the works of Jeremy Clarkson.

technorati tags:Charlie, Brooker, Medieval, History, paper, printing, Jeremy, clarkson, Amber, Spyglass, Guardian, BBC