The internet, with a touch of the finger, brings us the great libraries of the world, its newspapers, its magazines. It provides search engines and other tools that allow us quickly to locate whatever we want to read.
Indeed, the internet is the greatest reservoir of instantly available information and ideas the world has ever seen.
It should make each of us wiser — better equipped to be thoughtful members of a democratic community.
But one human weakness makes the internet, instead, perhaps the greatest threat democracy has ever faced.
The human weakness causing me, a lifelong optimist, to despair is our universal desire to see ratified our own opinions and biases. Psychologists call it the “confirmation bias.”
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